Decades in operations. They built what IT wouldn't.

Slocat Group is Faris Chesnutt and Patrick Kieffaber — best friends since college, and two operators who spent their careers in manufacturing and supply chain. Faris works from Charlotte, North Carolina; Patrick from Franklin, Tennessee. Neither is a developer. Neither ever worked in IT. Both built the systems their companies' IT wouldn't.

Faris put in more than three decades across textiles, consumer packaged goods, coatings, emissions control, and solar. At Sherwin-Williams he built a finite scheduling system for four plants out of spreadsheets wired read-only into Oracle. When IT wouldn't give him write access to push production dates back, he cobbled together a keystroke sender that keyed them in every night at midnight. Not elegant. It worked. The win that mattered: customer service could finally quote customers delivery dates that weren't already in the past.

Patrick brought the same instinct from the other side of the business — running manufacturing, distribution, and supply chain operations, with 20 years at the vice-president level for Fortune 500 and private-equity-backed companies. He lives in Franklin, Tennessee with his wife and two daughters. A couple of employers back, with no IT team behind him, he planned the logistics for an entire operation on an Access database he built himself, and he did that kind of deep work everywhere he went. It was never about the database. It was about speed: catching the subtle problems the big enterprise systems never flagged and driving a faster response, because the closer you sit to the customer, the better every call you make.

That's been the pattern for both of them — and it's exactly what AI agents do now, minus the midnight workaround. Slocat installs the stack on hardware you own, connects it to the systems you already run, and teaches you to drive it. The installs they're proudest of are the ones where the owner takes it somewhere no one would have thought to.

The division of labor is simple: Patrick is all about getting closer to the customer, and Faris is all about building the systems that get them there. What they agree on completely — senior people belong close to the customer, not twenty layers back. Slocat is two operators with no overhead, on purpose, and that closeness is the whole advantage.

A deliberately small practice. Disciplined work, not empire-building.