Taking on 2 new builds this month

The work that eats your week
shouldn't need a human.

Quotes typed by hand. Leads that go cold over a weekend. Posts that never get scheduled. I build the automation that does that work for you — accurately, every time, inside the tools you already use.

Book a free 30-min call See what I build

No pitch deck. We look at one workflow and I tell you straight whether automating it is worth your money.

Lockheed MartinSoftware engineer, production systems
$2M contractSecured with a critical software team
Military veteranUT Arlington, B.S. 2023
3.3M+ viewsBuilt and grew content channels myself
What I build

Three systems, built for three specific businesses

I don't sell generic "AI solutions." These are the three builds I know cold — each one aimed at the exact place the money leaks out of that business.

RFQ & part analysis for machine shops

A customer emails a PDF drawing and a spreadsheet. Someone opens every file, reads every dimension, types it into your quoting system, and guesses at material and cycle time. It takes hours, and the shop that answered first already won the job.

  • Reads incoming RFQ emails, drawings, and spec sheets automatically
  • Extracts part numbers, quantities, materials, tolerances, and due dates into structured data
  • Flags the parts you can't make or shouldn't bid before anyone wastes time on them
  • Drafts the quote in your format and drops it in front of you to approve, not retype
  • Logs every RFQ so you can see win rate by customer, material, and part type

The outcome: same-day quotes on jobs that used to sit for three days, and an estimator who spends their time on pricing strategy instead of data entry.

Lead follow-up for HVAC companies

A homeowner fills out your form at 7pm on a Saturday with no A/C. Your team sees it Monday. By then they've called three other companies and booked the one that answered in five minutes. The lead you paid for is gone, and nobody ever followed up on the estimate you did send.

  • Instant text and email response the moment a lead comes in — nights, weekends, holidays
  • Qualifies the job (repair vs. replace, system age, address, urgency) before you spend a truck roll
  • Books straight onto your schedule and sends reminders that cut no-shows
  • Automatic follow-up on unsold estimates at 3, 7, and 30 days so quotes stop dying quietly
  • Seasonal maintenance-plan reminders that turn one-time calls into recurring revenue

The outcome: every lead gets a response in under a minute, and the estimates you already paid to produce actually get a second and third shot at closing.

Social media systems for marketing agencies

Your team is doing good creative work and losing hours to the machinery around it — reformatting one video for four platforms, chasing client approvals in a group chat, and rebuilding the same report every month for every account. Margin disappears into busywork nobody can bill for.

  • One upload becomes every format: vertical, square, and wide cuts with captions burned in
  • AI-drafted captions and hooks in each client's voice, queued for a human to approve
  • Approval flows that ping the client and post automatically once they say yes
  • Scheduling across platforms from a single content calendar
  • Client reports that build themselves and land in the inbox on the first of the month

The outcome: the same team handles noticeably more accounts, because the hours go into strategy and creative instead of exporting and chasing.

Not one of these three? The underlying work is the same — reading messy documents, connecting tools that don't talk, and putting a reliable process around it. Tell me what's eating your week →

How it works

From first call to running system in about three weeks

No long discovery phase, no retainer before you've seen anything work.

  1. 01

    Free 30-minute call

    You walk me through the workflow that costs you the most time. I tell you honestly whether automation is worth it, and roughly what it would take. Some calls end with me saying don't bother — that's a fine outcome.

  2. 02

    Fixed-price plan

    You get a written scope: exactly what gets built, what it connects to, what it will and won't do, and one price. No hourly surprises and no scope drift halfway through.

  3. 03

    Build and test on real data

    I build against your actual documents and your actual leads, not a clean demo. Validation is built in from the start, because an automation that's quietly wrong is worse than no automation.

  4. 04

    Launch, train, and hand over

    Your team gets a walkthrough and simple documentation. Alerts tell you if anything fails instead of failing silently. Thirty days of support and monitoring are included.

Selected work

Systems I've built and shipped

Real projects, most of them open source. Click through and read the code if you want to know how I work.

n8n workflow that extracts structured data from photographed invoices into Google Sheets
Document extraction

Automated invoice extraction

A photo of a paper invoice becomes clean, validated rows in Google Sheets — vendor, line items, totals, dates — using n8n and the Claude API. This is the same engine behind machine-shop RFQ reading: messy documents in, structured data out.

View on GitHub →
n8n workflow turning meeting transcripts into tracked action items with owners and due dates
AI agents

Meeting notes → tracked action items

Drop in a transcript and get back a tracked list of commitments with an owner, a due date, and a priority on each one. Nothing gets agreed to in a meeting and then quietly forgotten.

View on GitHub →
Full stack + automation

Operator Dashboard

An all-in-one lead-generation and task dashboard (Next.js + FastAPI) that generates a prioritized daily plan, emails a morning briefing on a schedule, and takes commands over WhatsApp and SMS.

Live site → GitHub →
HVAC

Dragon A/C

A conversion-focused site for a North Texas HVAC company — built and deployed on Cloudflare, structured around one job: turning a visitor with a broken air conditioner into a booked call.

Live site → GitHub →
Manufacturing / CAD

Paramesh AI

Turns 3D scan meshes into parametric CAD models with an editable feature tree and STEP export. Built for exactly the kind of shop that lives in drawings, tolerances, and part geometry.

Live site → GitHub →
Media automation

DragonEditor

An AI video editor that trims dead air, adds captions, and pushes a finished cut out to MP4 or a DaVinci Resolve project — the content-repurposing core of the agency social system.

GitHub →

See everything on GitHub →

Trenton Dragon, founder of Unlocked Efficiency
Who you're working with

Hi, I'm Trent.

I'm a software engineer at Lockheed Martin, where I work on production systems that aren't allowed to fail. I played an important role on a critical software team that secured a $2 million contract, and I automated the testing on a decades-old codebase — which is how I found bugs that had been hiding in it for years.

That's the background I bring to small business automation. Most of what gets sold as "AI automation" is a no-code flow that works in the demo and breaks the first time a real document shows up. I write actual code around the messy parts: the APIs with no documentation, the PDFs that scan crooked, the edge cases that only appear in production. Then I put validation around it so you find out when something goes wrong instead of discovering it a month later.

I also build my own audience, so I'm not guessing about content systems — I've generated over 3 million views on TikTok with 3D printing content and 300,000 on YouTube with guitar content. I'm a military veteran, a 2023 UT Arlington graduate, and I work out of Arlington, Texas with clients across the country.

GitHub LinkedIn Watch my intro
n8nClaude & OpenAI APIsPythonTypeScriptMake.comTwilioGoogle WorkspaceCRM & webhook integrations
Questions

Straight answers

How long does a typical build take?

Most first systems go live in two to three weeks. We start with the single workflow that costs you the most time, ship it, and expand from there once you've seen it working. You're never waiting months to find out whether this was a good idea.

Do I have to replace the software I already use?

No. Everything is built around the tools you already run — your email, your CRM, your spreadsheets, your quoting or dispatch software. If two tools have no native integration, I write the connection myself. That's the part most automation people won't do.

What does it cost?

Every project is quoted as a fixed price after the free call, so you know the number before anything starts. Smaller single-workflow builds typically land in the low four figures; larger multi-system work is scoped individually. If the math doesn't work in your favor, I'll say so.

What happens if the automation breaks?

It tells you. Every system ships with validation and error alerts, so a failure sends a notification instead of quietly producing wrong data. Thirty days of support and monitoring are included after launch, and ongoing support is available if you want it.

Is my data safe if AI is involved?

Your data stays in your accounts. AI is used to read and classify documents, not to store your business. When confidentiality matters, I can run models locally or route everything through your own API keys so nothing passes through me at all.

Do you work with companies outside Texas?

Yes. The work is remote, delivered over video calls and shared documents. I'm based in Arlington, Texas and work with clients across the United States.

I'm not technical. Is that a problem?

Not at all — it's the normal case. You know your business and where the time goes; that's the part I can't supply. I handle everything technical and explain what's happening in plain language, without making you sit through jargon.

What's the one job you wish nobody had to do?

Bring that to a free 30-minute call. We'll look at it together and you'll leave knowing whether it's worth automating and roughly what it would cost — whether or not you hire me.

Book a free 30-min call Email me instead

Based in Arlington, Texas · Working with clients nationwide