Saturday in Hiram: What We Told Our Neighbors About AI

On Saturday, October 17, the Hiram Rosenwald School Museum threw a block party in Hiram, Georgia, and Jordan & Borden had a table at it. Our flag said Free Websites and AI for Small Business. We set up right next to Olive Tree Therapy & Wellness, which was not an accident. More on that below.

A block party is a good test of a business. Nobody there is shopping for software. They are walking past with kids and plates of food, and if they stop, you have about twenty seconds to say what you do in words that make sense.

Alysia's twenty seconds, caught on video, went like this: "We do work with the dismissal for the DeKalb schools as well. So we got check-in solutions, kiosks, as well as AI solutions that can answer, go through emails, whatever you need, we do. We even teach those kinds of programs as well. This is my business partner here."

That is the whole company in four sentences. This article is the longer version, for the people who took a flyer and want to know what the flyer meant.

The flag got the most questions, and the first one was always the same: free, really?

Yes. A four page website for your business, built from your answers, with a draft ready in about fifteen minutes. The catch is one 30-minute personalization consult, either an interview with Brian, our AI, or a live session with me. No credit card. The site goes live the same day as the consult, and with Brian that can be today.

We do it free because a lot of businesses in Paulding County still do not have a site at all, and a website is the first thing a new customer checks before they call or walk in. A business without one is losing customers it never hears about. We would rather fix that and earn the next piece of work than charge for the first page.

What the free site is not: a custom design project. It is four clean pages, your real hours and services, a way to contact you, and a link you can put on a flag of your own. Plenty of businesses never need more than that. The ones that do can grow into more.

The second question was usually some version of "what does the AI part mean?" Fair. The phrase has been used to sell almost anything this year.

For us it means an AI employee that picks up the phone when you cannot, answers the questions you get every day (hours, pricing, what you do), books the appointment, replies to the text or the email, and follows up with the lead that would otherwise go cold while your crew is on a job. It works from your real hours, services and policies, which you give it in an interview that takes about twenty minutes.

Where it falls short, and we say this at the table too: it only knows what you have told it. If your prices changed and nobody updated them, it will quote the old ones. It hands the hard conversations to a person instead of guessing. And it is not a chatbot bolted to a web page. It is closer to a front desk that never leaves, which means it needs a real front desk setup first.

The kiosk is the simplest thing we sell. Your customers check themselves in on an iPad when they arrive, and your team sees who is waiting without leaving the chair. It runs on a tablet you already own, for $49 a month, with no long-term contract.

The school version is the one Alysia mentioned first, because it is the one people in the parking lot could picture. For an afterschool program in DeKalb County, a parent's QR code or PIN creates a pickup request, a staff member sees it on a phone, and the child is released only after the system checks that this adult is allowed to pick up this child today. The code never releases anyone on its own. A person does, with the facts in front of them.

Same idea, two very different lobbies.

Olive Tree Therapy & Wellness is a therapy, massage and yoga practice in Hiram, run by Menyuan Jordan, LCSW, with a team of therapists, a massage therapist and a yoga instructor. They are a JAB client. We built their website and their check-in, and their booth was busy from the moment the gates opened.

Standing next to a client is the best demo we have. When someone asked what a JAB website looks like, we pointed ten feet to the left. When someone asked whether the check-in works in a real office, the people who use it every day were right there to answer.

If you run a business in Paulding County and want to see what we build, start with Olive Tree. That is a page we are proud of, and it is theirs.

The last line of Alysia's pitch surprises people. Yes, we teach this. Hands-on AI coding sessions for students, and live workshops for business owners who want to use these tools themselves instead of paying someone to be mysterious about them.

We do it because the tools are not going away and the people who learn to direct them will have the better jobs and the better businesses. A kid who has built one small thing with an AI coding agent understands more about what AI can and cannot do than most of the people selling it.

A table at a block party is not a sales funnel, and we would be lying if we described it as one. Most people took a flyer and kept walking. A few stopped and talked. The real test is not how many flyers went out. It is how many free websites get built in the next month by people who were there, and we will know that number because the system that builds them keeps the receipt.

We also did not film enough. The one clip of Alysia explaining what we do is twenty seconds long, shot on a phone, with a bounce house in the background. We are using it anyway, because it is real, and because the next event we will bring a tripod.

If you were there and took a flyer, the offer is open. If you were not, it is still open. Four pages, fifteen minutes to a draft, one conversation to make it yours.