Studios
For distribution, manufacturing, construction, and professional services owners who don’t have a CTO, can’t justify hiring developers, and have probably been burned by an agency before. We’re the technical co-pilot you don’t have to keep on payroll.
We’ve taken hundreds of consultations. The names change. The industries change. The software changes. The pain doesn’t.
“The VP had programmed over a 15-year period with Paradox, and the VP left at the same time. I was the only one left out of 110 people that had any idea how a database works.”
— Construction contractor, $40–50M revenue
“Everything is just a mess. It’s band-aid solutions to things, and we’re always uh, from IT perspective, from GL perspective, everything doesn’t work on it.”
— Manufacturing director of finance
“You’re paying for six different softwares, two of them are communicating, the other four you’re copy and pasting, and you’re ending up using Excel at the end of the year to do your numbers anyway.”
— Trucking operator, 35-truck fleet
“There’s a gap in data collection. Taking that data and putting it onto a software where at the end of the year, we can look at and say ‘truck 235 ran 100,000 miles this year. Here’s the repairs we did on it. Here’s the income it brought in.’ It’s tough to get.”
— Trucking operator, 35-truck fleet
“We used to be known really well for good communication, really good at delivering on time. And now since they’ve switched the ERP, they’ve been having almost the opposite effect. Committed to delivering on time and now you’re a week late.”
— Distribution director
If any of these sound like your week, we probably already know what’s causing it.
When Adam and I started the company, business owners kept calling us their tech guides. But that didn’t quite fit. We weren’t pointing them at a destination from a distance. We were sitting in the cockpit with them, taking accountability for the outcome. We were technical co-pilots. The business is the aircraft. The owner is flying it. We’re beside them, helping them get where they’re trying to go.
The aviation aesthetic followed naturally. We do business in an old-school way: hands-on, white-glove, tailored to each customer. We liked the iconic Pan-American era, when you’d dress up to get on a flight, when you were treated with respect and full attention, when American craftsmanship meant something. New technology through an old lens. That’s the work.
Almost every business owner we talk to has been burned by a developer or agency before. Most of what we believe came out of trying to be the opposite of what they experienced.
In about four out of five consultations, we recommend against custom software. Sometimes a configured off-the-shelf system serves the business better. Sometimes integrations on top of what you already have solves the problem. We’ll tell you which one fits, even if it costs us the engagement. Many of those prospects come back when custom is actually the right move.
Every consultation ends with a written summary of what we found and what we’d recommend. You keep it whether you hire us or not. We do this because being helpful without needing anything in return is the best marketing we’ve found.
The software industry has trained business owners to expect hourly billing, scope creep, and consultants who string out a project to bill more hours. We don’t do any of that. Flat monthly subscription. Two clients per senior US developer, max. Full capacity available if you want it. You scale up or down as your business shifts. Our incentive is to ship value fast, not bill more hours.
Not at handoff. Not after a clause expires. Day one. If you ever decide to bring the work in-house or move to a different vendor, the code goes with you. We’ve never had to honor our 60-day money-back guarantee, but if we ever do, the code stays yours.
We started Pilot West because we’d both spent over a decade in software and kept running into the same thing. Jake spent his career growing software companies inside the freight, transportation, and logistics space. Adam spent his as an engineer at software companies of every size. The pattern that kept showing up was the same: real business owners with real problems, software that was making things worse, and nowhere obvious to turn. People kept telling us that talking to us was a breath of fresh air. So we doubled down on it. We both work with every client directly, and we plan to keep it that way for a long time.
Jake spent close to a decade building software inside trucking, distribution, and freight forwarding businesses before starting Pilot West. He understands the operational lingo and can pick up a conversation with a dispatcher, driver, or operations lead without lag in understanding.
His role at Pilot West is the consultative one. Figuring out what a business actually needs. Telling prospects honestly when a custom build isn’t the right move. Keeping every engagement tight to the outcome that matters. He spends most of his week on calls with prospects and clients, not in the code.
Adam runs the engineering side of Pilot West and acts as a fractional CTO inside every engagement. He helps the engineering team think through what we’re actually solving for, picks the right technology to solve it, and reverse-engineers existing systems when integration or replacement is the right move.
The other half of the job is keeping the team and the company operating well. The work behind the engineering work. He stays close to every client alongside Jake, sees how the projects are landing, and keeps the bar high on what ships.
Verified reviews from clients who built with us.
“Having spent 10 years looking for software development, I don’t know that there’s any other software development company in the United States that will provide the service you provide. Maybe it’s just because I don’t know it and I got lucky with you guys first.”
— MISTY EBERSOLE, CEO · SASS · INTERVIEW, 2025
“They made us feel valued and respected, with the intention of building a lasting partnership rather than just collecting a paycheck.”
— MISTY EBERSOLE, CEO · SASS
“Every part of this project has been smooth, with clear communication and frequent check-ins throughout.”
— AMY CROWDER, OWNER · SWEET DREAMS
“Their ability to consistently connect development work to real business value set them apart.”
— TODD NICHOLS, CEO · TALKABROAD
“This would have taken other agencies double or triple the time.”
— DR. IAN ELLIS, FOUNDER & CEO · VOAFIT
A 30-minute call. We diagnose what’s actually causing the friction in your software, give you a written summary, and tell you honestly whether one of our services fits, or whether you need something else entirely. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll point you in the right direction. You leave with the summary, free to keep, whether or not we work together.