Currently taking on new clients

Ian Carstairs

Stop overpaying your vendors.

I tear down contracts, level quotes, and audit invoices for small businesses — fixed prices from $175, findings in as little as 72 hours. Start with a free savings call.

Book my free savings call

Free 30 min · No pitch — you’ll leave with 2–3 savings ideas either way.

Headshot of Ian Carstairs
✓Fixed prices — no hourly billing, ever ✓You work directly with me — no handoffs ✓Contract Teardown: 72 hours, guaranteed

Your vendors are billing you. But is anyone checking?

Most small businesses sign vendor contracts they never benchmarked, renew quotes they never leveled, and pay invoices nobody checked against the agreed rates. An auto-renewed contract or one unchecked rate increase quietly costs more than every service on this page combined — and nobody flags it, because nobody is paid to.

I am the person who checks. Do your own math below — no email, no signup.

You may be overpaying if any of these are true.

Mentally check each one. If several apply, your vendor spend is worth a review before the next renewal.

  • Haven’t rebid a vendor contract in 3+ years
  • Auto-renewals you couldn’t name offhand
  • Pay invoices without line-item review
  • A supplier with no competing quote in 2+ years
  • Software seats you can’t account for
  • Freight or merchant fees never benchmarked
Book my free savings call

Free 30 min · No pitch — you’ll leave with 2–3 savings ideas either way.

What’s the leak costing you?

Industry data suggests 3–8% of unmanaged vendor spend leaks through rate drift, billing errors, and unchallenged renewals.

  • The deal

    Every project is fixed-price, agreed in writing before I start. No hourly billing, no surprise invoices. The price on this page is the price you pay.

  • Contract Teardown guarantee

    If I don’t flag at least 3 issues worth more than the $300 fee, you don’t pay.

  • Independent

    I take no commissions or referral fees from vendors. Ever. The only interest in the room is yours.

01 /

What I'm focused on right now

Five fixed-scope projects at five fixed prices. Scope, price, and turnaround are agreed in writing before anything starts — pick the one your business needs first, and know exactly what you get and what it costs.

No hourly billing — ever. The price on this page is the price you pay.

Most clients start here 01

Contract Teardown

Send one vendor contract. Within 72 hours you get back a clause-by-clause markup of every commercial term that costs you money — plus exactly how to push back.

Fixed price$300
Turnaround72 hours

$300 flat — less than one hour of a lawyer’s time.Published market rates for contract review: $240–600/hr and up (UpCounsel, ContractsCounsel bids, Arceus Legal).

  • Annotated contract with every rate, escalator, auto-renewal, and termination clause flagged
  • Plain-language summary of what each clause actually costs you
  • Negotiation hit list: which terms to challenge, and specific language to propose
  • 30-minute walkthrough call to answer your questions

Best for: any contract coming up for renewal in the next 90 days, or one you signed in a hurry.

Shipped proof: the same analysis powers ClauseFlag, my AI contract-review tool — try it below.

See a sample teardown (fictionalized sample PDF)

Book my free savings call
02

Invoice Spot-Audit

One vendor, one quarter of invoices, checked line-by-line against the contract rates and terms you actually agreed to. Recoveries are quantified to the dollar, and you get a dispute letter you can send.

Contingency — no recovery, no feeYou pay nothing unless I find money — my fee is 20% of what I recover.
Turnaround5 business days

No invoice until the savings are in your hands. Or a $350 flat health-check if you prefer.

  • Invoice-to-contract rate reconciliation across the full quarter
  • Itemized list of every overcharge, fee, and rate deviation found
  • Recoveries estimate — the dollar figure on the table, quantified
  • Dispute letter draft you can send to the vendor
  • Ongoing controls suggestions so it doesn't happen again

Best for: your largest vendor relationships, especially ones billed by units, hours, or volume.

See a sample health check (fictional sample PDF)

Book my free savings call
03

Quote Leveling

Three competing vendor quotes turned into one apples-to-apples comparison — normalized for scope gaps, hidden fees, and contract terms.

Fixed price$175
Turnaround72 hours
  • Side-by-side pricing comparison with scope differences highlighted
  • Hidden costs and fee structures surfaced
  • Commercial-terms comparison across all quotes
  • Written recommendation of which bid to take, and why

Best for: competitive bids where the quotes arrived in different formats and nobody can tell what's actually cheapest.

See a sample leveling (fictional sample PDF)

Book my free savings call
04

Vendor Scorecard Dashboard

Your messy spend data becomes a clear dashboard: who you're paying, what's trending, and where the waste lives.

Fixed price$600
Turnaround1 week
  • Vendor spend dashboard with spend-by-vendor, category, and trend views
  • Key metrics: concentration risk, rate drift, renewal calendar
  • Built on your data, in Excel or a tool your team already uses
  • 30-minute training session plus a short user guide

Best for: operators who know spend is leaking somewhere but can't see the full picture in one place.

See a sample scorecard (fictional sample PDF)

Book my free savings call
05

Claude Workflow Setup

One AI workflow for your vendor paperwork — contract summarization, email triage, onboarding checklists, or invoice exception flagging — built on Claude and set up for your team.

Fixed price$750
Turnaround1 week
  • Custom AI workflow configured on Claude for your exact use case
  • Tested on your real documents before handoff
  • Step-by-step SOP so your team can run it independently
  • One follow-up session to tune it after a week of real use

Best for: teams drowning in vendor paperwork who want AI doing real work, not demos.

See a sample workflow package (fictional sample PDF)

Book my free savings call

Not sure which fits? That’s what the free call is for.

Book my free savings call

Your time required: about an hour. Send the contracts and invoices — I do the rest.

Prices are introductory launch prices — they reflect early-client rates and will rise as capacity fills.

Contract-related services cover commercial terms only — rates, escalators, renewals, termination windows, service levels. This is business analysis, not legal advice. I'm not a law firm and not your attorney, and no attorney-client relationship is formed. Where a question genuinely needs a lawyer, I'll tell you so.

ClauseFlag — the tool I built

I got tired of watching small businesses sign contracts nobody had time to read. So I built ClauseFlag: paste or upload a contract and get plain-English flags on the risky clauses, with market-norm badges showing what’s normal and what isn’t.

  • $1.99 per document ($4.99 for 3, $11.99 for 10) — cheaper than the coffee you’ll drink reading the contract yourself
  • Privacy-first: nothing is stored on a server, and personal data is redacted in your browser before anything is analyzed
  • Built from the same teardown method behind my $300 Contract Teardown service

Try the tool when you want a quick read. Book me when you want every line accounted for.

Try ClauseFlag

How it works

  1. Savings call

    Free · 30 minutes

    Send one vendor contract or messy quote ahead — I spot the costliest issues live, on the call.

  2. Fixed-price project

    $175–$750 · 72 hours to 1 week

    Scope, price, and turnaround are agreed in writing before anything starts. You know exactly what you get.

  3. You keep everything

    No retainer · no lock-in

    Reports, scorecards, and workflows are yours. Either way, you leave the call with 2–3 savings ideas.

I reply within one business day — usually faster.

02 /

About me

I spend my days in the details most people skip — vendor contracts, competing quotes, invoice line items, and the dashboards that make spend legible.

I'm an operations person at heart: I like turning messy vendor relationships into clear numbers and clean processes. That background grew into five fixed-price services — contract teardowns, quote leveling, invoice audits, scorecard dashboards, and AI workflow setups — each one scoped so a small business can buy it in a day or two and know exactly what they're getting.

I'm also a builder. When I kept doing the same contract-first-pass review by hand, I productized it: ClauseFlag, my AI contract-review tool, is live and taking documents.

When you email me, you get me — not a team, not a rep, not a handoff. I'd rather keep it small and excellent.

Education

Tulane University · 2022–2026

B.S., Management (Legal Studies in Business concentration) · B.A., International Relations · Altman Scholars dual-degree honors

  • ✓Legal research & writing — contract structure, regulatory analysis
  • ✓Regulatory monitoring & compliance campaigns — tracking rule changes that affect supplier relationships
  • ✓Vendor management fundamentals — onboarding, performance review, renewals

Capabilities

  • ✓Commercial contract review — rates, escalators, renewals, SLAs (not legal advice)
  • ✓Invoice auditing & reconciliation — line-by-line recovery work
  • ✓Advanced Excel, certified — financial modeling, spend analysis, dashboards
  • ✓AI-assisted workflow automation — Claude, Copilot for real ops work
  • ✓R-Studio — data analysis and statistical review

Languages

EnglishNative
SpanishProfessional / conversational — business, legal & medical coursework

Study abroad and professional experience in Bogotá, Colombia.

Scope boundaries

  • ✓Commercial contract terms — rates, escalators, renewals, SLAs
  • ✓Vendor relationship analysis — spend, performance, compliance
  • —Not legal advice — I am not a law firm and not your attorney
03 /

Built & shipped.

I don’t just advise on this — I built the tool. ClauseFlag is the proof: a live product that puts the same contract-review craft behind my service work into anyone’s hands.

Start with a $1.99 AI scan — upgrade to a full $300 human teardown when the stakes are high.

My productClauseFlag

AI contract review for renters, new hires, freelancers, and small businesses. Paste or upload any contract — PDF, DOCX, or a photo, with on-device OCR — and get a plain-English breakdown in under a minute.

  • Clause-by-clause flags: what each clause means, why it matters, and who it favors
  • Market-norm badges — typical, unusual, or aggressive — for that agreement type
  • Severity ratings, a bottom-line verdict, a pre-signing checklist, a negotiation email draft, and key dates
  • Catches auto-renewal lock-ins, deposit and fee traps, non-competes, payment traps, scope creep, ownership overreach, and one-sided exits

Pricing

$1.99 per document · $4.99 for 3 · $11.99 for 10. If the report is useless, I refund it.

Privacy

No account, no server storage — each analysis is processed and discarded, and PII is redacted in your browser before anything is sent.

Positioning

Not legal advice, and doesn’t pretend to be — it’s the fast first pass that tells you whether you need a lawyer, before your signing deadline. Lawyers charge $200–500 and take 3–7 days; ClauseFlag takes a minute.

Try ClauseFlag live →

Why it’s here: ClauseFlag is proof of craft for two services on this page — the Contract Teardown’s clause-by-clause analysis, and the Claude Workflow Setup’s AI-build chops. Hire the teardown and you get the same analysis with a human-written negotiation memo on top.

Sample deliverables: See a sample teardown (fictionalized sample PDF) · See a sample leveling (fictional sample PDF) · See a sample health check (fictional sample PDF) · See a sample scorecard (fictional sample PDF) · See a sample workflow package (fictional sample PDF)

You get Ian — the person on the call does the work. No handoffs, no juniors learning on your account, no telephone game between you and the numbers. That direct accountability is the product.

The elephant in the room: I’m new to consulting — I won’t pretend otherwise. Here’s what I can show you instead: a contract-review tool I built and ship myself (ClauseFlag), fixed prices published on this page, and a guarantee in writing. No vague claims, no borrowed logos.

04 /

Me vs. the alternatives

Most businesses either hand the work to someone they never meet, or never check their vendors at all. There’s a middle option.

Working with me

who you’d hire

  • Fixed prices published right on this page
  • You talk to the person doing the work — that’s me
  • You keep everything: reports, scorecards, workflows
  • Zero vendor commissions, referral fees, or product agendas

Typical agency

the conventional option

  • Custom quotes — no number until the pitch call
  • Sold by a partner, delivered by juniors you never meet
  • Monthly retainers that keep the meter running

Doing nothing

the default

  • Auto-renewals roll through unchallenged
  • Rate increases slip past on invoices nobody reconciles
  • The leak continues — roughly 3–8% of your vendor spend

Who this is for

  • SMB owners and ops managers signing or renewing vendor contracts
  • Small teams that want a fixed-price answer, not a retainer
  • Anyone who suspects their vendor bills deserve a second pair of eyes

Who this is not for

  • Enterprises with a procurement team — you’ve outgrown this
  • Anyone seeking legal advice — I’m not a lawyer
  • Anyone who wants hourly billing

If you’re not sure which camp you’re in, bring one contract to the free savings call — I’ll tell you straight, including telling you it’s not worth it.

Book my free savings call

Free 30 min · No pitch — you’ll leave with 2–3 savings ideas either way.

05 /

Questions people ask before booking

Straight answers to the things people usually want to know before they schedule a call.

Q. Is this legal advice?+

No. Every service here covers commercial terms — pricing, rate escalators, auto-renewals, termination windows, service levels. That's business analysis, not legal advice.

I am not a law firm and not your attorney, and nothing here creates an attorney-client relationship. Where a question genuinely needs a lawyer, I'll tell you so — and the markup makes your attorney's time cheaper and faster.

Q. How do you handle confidential documents?+

Everything you send is treated as confidential by default: documents are used only for your project, never shared with any third party, and deleted on request when the engagement ends. Happy to sign an NDA before you share anything.

Q. What do you need from me to start?+

For contracts and quotes, PDFs are fine. For invoice audits, a quarter of invoices plus the contract they should match. For dashboards, a spend export from your accounting or procurement system — whatever format it comes in. And one person I can reach with quick questions.

If your data is messy, that isn't a problem — that's usually the whole point.

Q. How fast is turnaround, really?+

The published turnarounds are the commitment: 72 hours for contract teardowns and quote leveling, 5 business days for invoice audit findings, and 1 week for dashboards and workflow setups. The clock starts when I have the documents.

Q. What do the fixed prices include?+

Everything listed in each service card — the deliverables, the calls, the follow-ups. The price you see is the price you pay. The Invoice Spot-Audit works differently: it's contingency-based — you pay nothing unless I find money, my fee is 20% of what I recover, and there's no invoice until the savings are in your hands. If you'd rather cap it, the $350 flat health-check is available as an alternative.

Current prices are introductory launch rates and will increase as capacity fills, so projects booked now lock in these rates.

Q. Can I get a sense of the potential savings before committing?+

Yes — that’s what the free 30-minute Vendor Savings Call is for. You bring one vendor contract or a messy quote, and I give you my honest take on whether there’s money on the table. No pitch deck, no pressure. If there’s a fit, we talk projects; if not, you keep the read and we part ways.

Q. I’ve never hired a consultant before — why should I trust you?+

Fair question. Here’s what de-risks it: my prices are fixed and in writing before any work starts, the Contract Teardown is guaranteed (no 3 issues worth the fee, no charge), and you see the value on the free savings call before you pay anything. I built ClauseFlag, a live contract-review tool, as public proof I know this work — and I take zero commissions from vendors, so my advice only ever points one way: at your costs.

Q. What happens on the 30-minute call?+

Before the call, you send me one contract or supplier quote. I review it ahead of time, so you leave with 2–3 concrete flags, whether or not we work together. On the call itself, I’ll tell you honestly whether a project is worth doing — including telling you it’s not. No pitch deck. If there’s real money to recover, we’ll talk about which project fits; if not, you hang up with expert eyes on your paperwork for free.

Stop overpaying your vendors.

No pitch. If we’re not a fit, I’ll say so.

30 min · Free · you’ll leave with 2–3 concrete findings


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Fixed-price projects $175–$750 · no hourly billing, no surprises

Services cover commercial contract terms and vendor analysis only — not legal advice. Not a law firm; no attorney-client relationship is formed.