Skip to main content
Marhardt Consulting

Auburn Hills, MI · Oakland County

Technology Consulting, IT Strategy & Automationfor Auburn Hills Small Businesses

Oakland County’s corporate & automotive-tech corridor.

Auburn Hills runs on engineering, automotive technology, and B2B services. We help the smaller firms in that ecosystem move as fast as the giants around them.

Auburn Hills firms rarely need to be found. They need the operation behind the sale to stop running on spreadsheets and goodwill. Internal systems, integrations, and working prototypes, built by someone who will sit in your office to scope it.

Working with Auburn Hills

Built for how Auburn Hills does business.

Auburn Hills is a corporate and automotive-technology hub — a dense corridor of headquarters, engineering and supplier firms, a major university, and a large retail center, clustered around I-75. The small and mid-sized firms operating alongside these anchors need serious internal systems and integrations, not just a brochure website.

Engineering & automotive-tech firms

Custom internal tools, reporting, and system integrations.

B2B & professional services

Workflow automation that removes duplicate data entry across systems.

Growing startups & founders

Fixed-price prototypes that turn an idea into a working product.

The Auburn Hills market

Engineering and corporate density, and the small firms working in its shadow.

Auburn Hills is unusual among the towns on this list: roughly 25,000 residents but a daytime population several times that, because the corridor along I-75 is headquarters, engineering, and automotive-technology firms rather than housing. A major university sits inside it and a large retail centre anchors one end. The businesses that call us are almost never the anchors. They are the ten to sixty person engineering, supplier, and professional firms working alongside them, held to enterprise expectations on reporting and data handling with none of the enterprise headcount.

Around here:I-75 corporate corridorThe university campusAutomotive-technology clusterAuburn Hills

About fifteen minutes southeast of our Clarkston base.

Service Spotlight · Auburn Hills

Where Auburn Hills businessesshould start.

Auburn Hills runs on engineering and automotive technology, so the firms here usually need working internal systems long before they need another brochure page — these two are where that work starts.

Custom Build

Custom Business Software

One place to run your business, built around how you work.

  • Real-time operational visibility
  • Centralized knowledge and SOPs
  • Reduced errors from manual tracking
For Founders

Custom App Build

Turn your idea into a working product — at a fixed price.

  • Working full-stack product delivered
  • Clear scope before build begins
  • 50% upfront · 50% on delivery

Auburn Hills Local Market

25K

Residents

$84K

Median household income

12K

Households

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau ACS, via Census Reporter (2024 5-year)

The honest comparison

What else a Auburn Hills business could do.

These are the real options, described fairly. More than one of them is a reasonable choice depending on your situation, and we will say so on a call.

A management consultancy

$15,000+ per engagement

You get a strategy and a deck. Worth it when the direction is genuinely unclear, but nobody builds the thing at the end.

Hiring an internal technology lead

$120,000+ per year

The right answer eventually. Below roughly fifty people it is a large fixed cost for a genuinely part-time role, and the search alone takes months.

Enterprise software licences

$20,000+ per year and up

Built for the anchors, not for you. Powerful, and you will use maybe a fifth of it while paying to configure the rest.

Our approach

Fractional leadership plus build

$100 to $300 / mo, scoped up as needed

Senior direction month to month and the systems actually get built. You own what we make and can stop when the problem is solved.

What it has to earn

One job a month covers it.

Here is the arithmetic, with the assumption stated so you can argue with it. Conservative against Auburn Hills contract values, where a single recovered engagement is usually a multiple of this.

We assume

$1,500

profit on one engineering and B2B service job in Auburn Hills. Yours is probably different. Substitute it and the rest of the maths still works.

The plan costs

$100 to $300

per month, with no upfront build fee. Site, hosting, local SEO, and review management included.

So one job pays for

5 to 15 months

Everything after that is margin. The site does not stop working when you stop paying attention to it, which is the part that separates it from ads.

Against renting the same leads

The directories charge $250 to $500 per booked job on Angi or HomeAdvisor. That is a cost per job, every job, with no end. Worse, 3 to 8 contractors get sold the same lead, so you are bidding against neighbours on price for work you all paid to reach.

Owning the presence flips that from a variable cost into a fixed one. It is slower to start: expect the site live in under ten days, the Google profile moving within the first month, and search position building over three to six. Rented leads are faster on day one, which is exactly why they can charge per job.

Sources: Homeshowoff, cost per contractor job, LeadTruffle, Angi lead guide. Figures are illustrative, not a projection of your results.

5.0· 3 Google reviews

As the owner of Adams Imprints, I knew I needed more than just a website—I needed a business platform that would actually help me run my business.

Auburn Hills questions, answered.

Do you build custom internal systems for Auburn Hills firms?

Yes — dashboards, reporting, and integrations are a core service, scoped and quoted per project.

Can you help a founder build a prototype?

That’s exactly what our Prototype service is for — a scoped, fixed-price full-stack build from discovery to a working release.

Who owns the work, and how is our information protected?

You own everything we build — code, systems, and data. We’re glad to sign an NDA before we ever see anything sensitive.

We are held to our customers’ data requirements. Does that change what you build?

It shapes it from the start rather than being added afterwards. Records stay in systems you own, access is scoped per person, credentials never sit in the browser, and anything customer-facing is built assuming it will be audited. Bring your specific obligations to the first conversation and we design around them.

How does this compare to hiring someone internally?

For most firms under about fifty people, a full-time technology lead is a six-figure fixed cost for a role that is genuinely part-time. A retainer gives you the senior judgement without the headcount, and when you do outgrow it we will tell you it is time to hire.

Can you build something we can test before committing?

That is what our prototype work is for. A working version of the idea, in weeks rather than quarters, so the decision to build properly is made against something real instead of a document.

Before you hire anyone

Read up first. No form required.

Auburn Hills firms rarely need convincing that software matters. These are about the quieter version of the problem: the systems that quietly stopped scaling, and the enquiries that die in the gap before anyone replies.

Serving Auburn Hills & Oakland County

Ready to simplify your Auburn Hills business? Let’s talk — free.

Fifteen minutes from Clarkston. Bring the messy version of the problem to the first conversation, that is the useful one.

Email or phone — one is required. We reply within one business day.

What do you need help with? *

★ 5.0 on Google · Free · No pitch, no pressure