You’re not hiring a vendor. You’re hiring an operator.
Thirty-five years building the systems businesses actually run on — now pointed at your repetitive work.
The Kleenex Box
When I started my investigation firm, clients kept getting angry at us for the same reason.
They’d hire us to watch a house. We’d sit there for seven, eight hours — and see nobody. Clients were spending $2,500 to $5,000 on an investigation and sometimes getting little more than footage of an empty driveway.
I kept telling them what every investigator tells clients:
“We can’t sit there 24/7.”
One day I heard myself say it and flipped it around: okay — what COULD sit there 24/7?
Not a person. Way too expensive. Then the real question showed up: what could sit on that street that nobody would ever look at twice?
A car.
Every street in the country is full of parked cars. They’re invisible. So I bought an old car. Four car batteries and a converter. A remote camera and a recording box I could log into from anywhere.
Then the last problem: you can’t have a camera visible in a car window. So I built a small glass box, covered it in one-way film, cut a hole in the top, and stuffed Kleenex in it.
From outside, it was a Kleenex box on a dashboard. From inside, it was a surveillance camera recording around the clock.
That rig could sit legally parked on a street, recording 24/7 for five days as part of our licensed investigative work. Then I built a way to sift the footage so we only reviewed the moments with movement. We could learn someone’s routine from a couple of hours reviewing footage, without paying an investigator to sit outside all day.
And the routine was the goldmine. Conventional surveillance runs during predictable working hours. The rig caught what that misses: people leaving home at strange times, mowing lawns, climbing onto roofs — doing the things they’d claimed they couldn’t do. Once we knew the routine, our investigators needed roughly half as much field time to get the evidence.
Here’s what it did to the business:
We charged a flat $250 a day for the rig. Clients’ overall surveillance costs dropped by roughly half — and they stopped paying thousands for empty driveways. The system paid for itself in its first month.
The waiting was never the product. Clients weren’t paying for a person in a car — they were paying for answers. The waiting was just an expensive step everyone had learned to accept.
That one build taught me the method I’ve used ever since, in every business I’ve run:
- 1When someone says “we can’t,” flip it: what could?
- 2Find the thing that already does the job — it’s just called something else. (A car isn’t transportation. It’s the one object a street is designed to ignore.)
- 3Don’t make the expensive thing cheaper. Kill the reason you keep paying.
I’ve since used the same three steps to build an 18,000-customer medical supply business around government-funded purchasing channels the big players aren’t structured to serve — and to build my dog a hydrotherapy pool out of a cold plunge tub, because $140 a session forever is a leak, and I kill leaks.
That’s what Divergent Minds is. Not a product company. A method, applied.
James has spent 35 years in technology. He helped build national infrastructure at Shaw, Bell, and the Government of Alberta, then built and operated the technical backbone of his own companies. A serial entrepreneur, he’s spent years eliminating repetitive work in his own operations — and streamlining other companies’ along the way.
His instinct has always been the same: strip a process down to its bare necessities first, then build a system to run what’s left. Decades of doing exactly that is what Divergent Minds now does for other businesses.
Who actually does the work
You work directly with the team that designs and builds your system — the people in the first meeting are the people who ship it.
Small and hands-on, by design.
When you work with Divergent Minds, you work directly with the people building your systems — no handoffs between you and the person who actually does the work.
We’ll tell you the truth — including when not to automate.
We won’t sell you software you don’t need, and we won’t bolt automation onto a process that should be fixed first. Our job is to give you back hours and money.
Meet the operator behind it.
Start with a free introductory call. Plain-English answers and the truth about whether the audit is worth your money.