About
Two of us, working out of Cincinnati. Most of what we've built is running inside businesses we own or operate, which is why the case studies have real numbers in them.
We're operators first
Built for companies we own or operate: entertainment venues across four states, a vending and amusement route operation, a vehicle storage yard. "When a rollout goes badly, we're the ones who have to explain it to our own staff on Monday. It makes us conservative about scope and stubborn about the details that only matter later."
Who you're working with
Founder
Aaron runs Full Throttle, a multi-venue entertainment park business, and a storage operation for cars, RVs, and boats. Both run on software Acorn Works built — scheduling, bookings, collections, billing, reporting.
Most of what's on this site exists because one of his businesses needed it on a Monday and nobody sold it. He's the reason the case studies are real.
Engineer
Evan ran his own business for years the disorganized way — quotes one place, invoices another, the schedule in his head. Then he built the software that ran it for him, and found he was better at that than anything else.
He writes the systems and sits with the people who use them. He'll take any excuse to get out of the office and watch the work happen.
How we build
Ship in phases, specific about what a phase does and doesn't include.
First deliverable is usually a clickable version on sample data — "much cheaper to be wrong at that stage."
Build for the person holding the device: large tap targets on a floor, short PIN on shared devices, bigger type when the user isn't twenty-five. "The difference between a system people use and a system people route around."
Permissions, audit trails, and data privacy are part of the build, not phase two: row-level security, soft deletes, opt-in records, secrets in a vault and never in a bundle.
What we won't do
Won't sell a platform you grow into. Won't put an AI feature in front of a problem a query would solve. Will say when the answer is process change rather than software.
Common questions
Almost always. Most business software has an API, and where it doesn't there is usually a database or an export we can work from. Part of the diagnostic is finding out quickly which of those we're dealing with, because it changes what's worth building.
We tell you, the engagement ends at the diagnostic, and you keep the written analysis. It happens regularly. Sometimes the fix is that two people change the order they do things in, and we would rather say that early than build something your team quietly routes around.
Yes. The code and the data are yours from the first commit, in your repository and your database. There is no licence to keep paying and nothing that stops working if you stop working with us.
It can be, when the connection is outbound only, what gets shared is limited to what you have agreed to, and every answer traces back to a record you can check. We do not open an inbound port into your network, and we do not give a model unsupervised authority over decisions involving money.
Yes. We are based in Cincinnati and take work across the country. We travel for the diagnostic when being in the room is what the work needs.
Whatever you want to happen. We can run and support it on a defined engagement, stay available for changes, or step back entirely once your team is trained and the documentation is handed over.
Start a conversation
We'll come back with whether we can help and roughly what it would take. Usually within one business day.