About Marathon Consulting
Two people who got tired of watching small businesses miss out on AI.
Marathon Consulting is a Charlotte AI consulting firm for owner-run businesses with fewer than thirty people. We research where AI can take repetitive work off your plate, explain what we'd recommend and why, and build it with you if you want us to.
Why we started Marathon
Most of the AI help on offer is built for companies with an IT department. Big consulting firms don't take on a twelve-person HVAC shop or a four-person accounting practice, and software vendors will sell you a subscription but won't tell you whether you need it.
That leaves the owner to sort it out at night, after the real work is done. We've both spent our careers inside the kind of processes that eat those evenings: invoices, reconciliations, follow-ups, reports built by hand. We started Marathon to do that research for owners, in plain language, and to stay around long enough to make it work.
We're based in Charlotte and work with businesses across the metro, from Huntersville and Mooresville down to Pineville, Matthews and Fort Mill.
The founders
Adam Barry
Co-founderAdam combines expertise in finance and credit with hands-on experience implementing AI agents and automated workflows. He has closed books for a living, which is why bookkeeping automation is the work we know best. He helps small businesses put AI to work where it saves time and makes financial sense.
Brenden Hennessy
Co-founderBrenden started in consulting, advising large companies on risk and finance. He now works in process improvement, finding slow, manual work and fixing it. He brings that same habit to small businesses: map how the work actually moves, then decide what's worth changing.
How we work
These are the rules we build by. They come from our internal playbook, and they apply to every project.
- A person approves before anything goes out.
Automations start by drafting, sorting and filing. You or your team approve what gets sent or posted. Letting one step run on its own is your decision, made in writing, after you've watched it work.
- Your accounts, not ours.
We build inside the email, spreadsheets and QuickBooks you already own, using delegated access. We never ask for your passwords. When a project ends, you can remove our access in one place and everything keeps running.
- We test on your real work first.
Before handoff, we run each automation against thirty past examples from your business and write down how it did. If it gets a customer or an amount wrong, we fix the cause before anyone relies on it.
- Business-grade AI tools for business data.
Anything with customer names, financial records or health details goes through business tiers where the provider doesn't train on your data by default. We explain what each tool receives before it's switched on. Here's how the major tools compare.
- We tell you when AI isn't the answer.
Sometimes the fix is a setting in software you already pay for, or a better spreadsheet. The first conversation is free, and if we don't think AI will help, we say so.
What we do
We offer three things, and you can stop after any of them.
- A free first conversation. You tell us what's eating your week. We tell you whether we think AI can help.
- The $999 AI Assessment. We research your specific problems and the tools that could solve them, then walk you through a report with priorities, estimated hours saved and the value of that time. See what's included.
- Implementation, training and support. If you want us to build what we recommended, we quote it as a package, set it up in your accounts, train your team and hand over the documentation. How implementation works.
Why "Marathon"
The name is a promise about pace. We're not here for a quick win and a disappearing act. AI tools change every few months, and the setup that works today will need adjusting. We'd rather be the people you call about it next year.
The company is registered in North Carolina as Marathon Consulting AI LLC. We're based in Charlotte and were founded in 2026.
Start here
Tell us what eats your week. We'll tell you if we can fix it.
The first conversation is free. If there's a fit, the $999 AI Assessment gives you researched solutions, estimated savings and a clear plan. Implementation is a separate choice.