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About

Founder-led, and deliberately small.

Every engagement is led by Marcus Cziesla — the same person who scopes the work, designs it, and stays on it through launch. When a build calls for depth in a particular area, he brings in specialists who have done that exact work before.

Marcus Cziesla, founder of Tellico AI Solutions

Founder & Principal Consultant

Marcus Cziesla

I've spent close to three decades bringing technologies to market before their categories had names — cloud management, hybrid cloud, hyperscale storage, and now applied AI.

I was the first sales leader at ManageIQ, an angel-funded startup whose cloud management platform defined its category, and led sales from first funding through acquisition by Red Hat. At Red Hat I built the cloud solutions practice, growing annual subscription revenue from under $5 million to over $140 million and scaling the specialist organization from three teams to twenty-five. At AWS I ran storage go-to-market for the West region inside a business doing over $750 million.

I have a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Swarthmore College, and I still build things myself. That combination is the point: I can scope a project, justify what it's worth, and then actually deliver it.

The team

A principal on every project, and specialists when the work needs them.

Tellico is built as a small practice rather than an agency, and that's a deliberate choice about who ends up working on your system.

CONSTANT

One person accountable

Marcus leads every engagement from the first call through launch — the audit, the design, the decisions, and the relationship. You never get handed to an account manager, and you never re-explain your business to someone new.

AS NEEDED

Specialists brought in by name

Some builds need someone who has spent years on telephony, or systems integration, or getting data out of an ERP that would rather not give it up. For those, Tellico engages specialists with that specific track record — chosen for the project, not assigned from a roster.

ALWAYS

Same terms, same obligations

Anyone who touches your systems works under the same written agreement Tellico does, bound by confidentiality terms no less protective than ours. Tellico stays responsible for their work — you have one company to hold to it, not a chain of subcontractors.

Why not just grow into an agency?

Because a bench has to be kept busy, and a bench that needs feeding is how a two-week problem turns into a six-week proposal. Staying small means the recommendation you get is the one the work actually justifies — and it means the person who sold you the project is the one who has to make it work.

Why small businesses, after all that

It's a fair question, and worth answering directly rather than leaving you to wonder.

Every technology I've worked on followed the same path: it showed up in the enterprise first, cost a fortune, required specialists, and took years to reach anyone smaller. Cloud did it. Virtualization did it. By the time a fifty-person company could use any of it, the advantage had already been spent by companies a hundred times their size.

AI is on a much faster curve, and the tools are already cheap enough for a twenty-person contractor to use. What hasn't reached those businesses is the implementation — the part where someone works out what's actually worth automating and then builds it into how the business runs. The large consultancies aren't coming; the engagements don't clear their minimums.

That gap is the interesting problem, and it's a better use of what I know than another enterprise go-to-market plan. There's also something to building things for people who can tell you within a week whether it worked.

How Tellico works

A real company, with the paperwork to match.

A small firm should be held to a higher standard of clarity, not a lower one — especially when you haven't met us.

STRUCTURE

Tennessee LLC

Tellico AI Solutions LLC, formed in Tennessee in August 2026 and based in Knoxville. Registered, in good standing, and yours to look up.

TERMS

Written agreement, every time

A master consulting agreement with a statement of work for each engagement. Scope, deliverables, timeline, and cost in writing before work starts — changes go through a signed change order, not an invoice.

INDEPENDENCE

Paid only by you

No software resale, no vendor referral fees, no commissions from anyone whose product I might recommend. If the right answer is a tool you already own, that's what you'll hear.

Where we work

Knoxville, Tennessee. Midwest and Southeast.

Tellico is based in East Tennessee and works with small businesses across the Midwest and Southeast.

Nearly all of it is delivered remotely, and that isn't a compromise — the Roberts Glass & Service system covers voice, messaging, scheduling, reporting, and an ERP integration, and it was built without needing to stand in their office to do it.

Where being on site genuinely helps — walking a job, watching how the work actually happens during an audit — that gets planned into the engagement rather than billed as a surprise.

Start with twenty minutes.

Bring the thing that costs you the most — the hours, or the argument you keep losing. We'll tell you straight whether it's worth solving, and if it isn't, we'll say so.

Book a 20-minute call