Deer Run Partners

Operational systems for Vermont's small businesses

For the people who make Vermont, Vermont.

We help Vermont's makers, farmers, hospitality operators, and independent professionals modernize the systems behind their business. Less time on the manual work pulling you away from your core. More time on the relationships and community that make this place what it is.

Tell us about your operation How we work

The reality

Sound familiar?

If you run a small business in Vermont, whether it's a maple operation, a six-room inn, a furniture studio, a CSA-and-farm-stand, or a fractional CFO practice, your business runs on real relationships, careful work, and a stack of tools that don't talk to each other. The relationships and the work are why people choose you. The tool sprawl is why your weekends are spent on admin.

You're copying data between four systems on Monday morning. You're chasing payment from accounts you've worked with for years. You can't get a clean view of where anything actually stands. The tools you need already exist. They just don't work together.

It's not that you're disorganized. It's that you've outgrown the tools, and stitching them together properly, without losing the soul of how you work, is a real technical job. One that has nothing to do with why you started the business.

  • I'm in four different tools every Monday and I still miss orders.

  • I have customers I've worked with for years and no way to tell who's reordering.

  • It's a perfect Saturday and I'm reconciling spreadsheets.

How we help

Three ways in, depending on where you are.

We don't replace your tools, your craft, or your relationships. We modernize the systems behind them so they actually work together, and automate the manual work eating your week. Most engagements run a few weeks at a fixed price, and you own everything we build.

  1. Operations Audit & Architecture

    We map how your business actually runs: your tools, your data, where things break. Then we give you a clear, prioritized plan for fixing it. You walk away knowing exactly what to do, whether you do it with us or not.

  2. Operational Backbone Build

    We connect your systems, clean up your data, and automate the manual work that's eating your week: customer and project tracking, communication, reporting. The result is one place where everything is current and nothing falls through the cracks.

  3. Operations Intelligence Layer

    Once the foundation is solid, we layer in smart automations that genuinely save you time: summarizing your inbox so the right conversations get the right attention, drafting follow-ups in your voice, surfacing the right information before you need it. Real leverage. Not novelty. Not replacement.

Case study

What this looks like in practice.

One example: a multi-brand wholesale showroom in NYC and Paris. Different industry from most of who we work with in Vermont, but the same underlying operational problem: scattered tools, manual reconciliation, things falling through the cracks. The fix looks different in the details. The leverage looks similar.

[Client / showroom name]

A multi-brand wholesale showroom representing [N] brands across NYC and Paris.

Placeholder: real walkthrough coming soon

Before

Five separate inboxes. A 1,000-store spreadsheet. Commission tracking done by hand across every brand and every season.

What we built

Consolidated her communications into one system. Automated the email-to-account tracking. Built smart automations that summarize and route incoming mail. Set up commission reporting that generates itself.

The result

About eight hours a week back. Nothing slipping through the cracks. A single source of truth she can share with each of her brands.

~8 hrs
back per week
1
source of truth (was 5+)
0
things slipping through

2–3 minute walkthrough of the working system

[Loom embed drops in here]

“[Client quote: specific and concrete about what changed.]”

[Client name], [Role]

About

Built here, for the people who build here.

We've spent our careers close to the operational side of businesses. We started Deer Run Partners in Vermont because modern operational tools have finally gotten good enough and cheap enough to put real leverage within reach of the small businesses that actually run this state, not just the companies with big budgets.

Our job is straightforward: take the manual work and the tool sprawl off your plate, so the part of the business that only you can do gets the time it deserves. The part that makes Vermont feel like Vermont.

We work with a small number of clients at a time, so the work stays hands-on and the quality stays high.

  • Fixed price, fixed scope. You know what you're getting and what it costs before we start.
  • You own everything we build. No proprietary platform, no lock-in.
  • A few clients at a time. We don't try to be everywhere. The work stays sharp.

Get in touch

Tell us about your operation.

A short, gated intake. Five steps, a few minutes. You give us enough context that we can come back to you with an initial read on what we'd build and what it would cost. No pitch, no pressure.

  1. 1Basics
  2. 2Tools
  3. 3Manual work
  4. 4Top pain
  5. 5Uploads
A few basics

Kind of business
The tools you live in

List the systems you use day-to-day. We want a real picture, not a brochure list. Three or four is fine if that's the truth.

The manual work

What do you do by hand each week that you wish you didn't? Concrete is better than abstract.

The single most painful thing

If we could only fix one thing for you, what would it be? This is the most useful field. Be specific.

Optional uploads

Screenshots of your current setup, an example spreadsheet, a CSV export. Anything that shows us the shape of your operation. Optional. Skip if you'd rather not.

Drop files here, or click to choose

Up to 10 MB each. Images, PDFs, CSVs, spreadsheets, or plain text.

    We only use what you share here to follow up with you and draft an initial scope. Uploaded files are stored privately and never shared. We don't sell your information or add you to any list.