How a New Orleans Small Business Is Using AI to Manage Growth and Make More Room for People

By ICIC | October 26, 2026

Valerie Vides has a confession. Some days, the most honest voice in her business isn’t a person—it’s AI.

Her path to that point started with a house. In 2016, she and her husband, Gustavo “Gus” Vides, bought a 1907 double shotgun house in New Orleans. Years of big-box “improvements” had stripped away most of its character, but the original wood windows were still hanging on. The one restoration company they found was far beyond their budget. So Gus enrolled in what Valerie calls YouTube university.

That detour became NOLA Wood Windows, a window restoration and manufacturing shop that opened on April 22, 2018. Gus left a 25-year offshore career in the Gulf of Mexico to run the shop full time in 2019. Valerie kept her corporate HR job by day and ran the back office at night until early 2023, when a layoff pushed her into the business for good.

Then came a revenue jump of 77 percent in a single year. Small business growth like that sounds like a dream. Valerie will tell you it’s also a stress test that challenged everything they’d built. Executive education and AI training gave her the knowledge and systems needed to grow steadily year over year.

We asked her what she’s learned along the way.

“We’re Accidental Business Owners”

ICIC: How did a home repair project turn into a business?

Valerie: We couldn’t afford the solution to our problem, and we didn’t want to tear out our windows. My husband found a guy in Florida who offered free monthly workshops, so we went. He told us there was a business in this and a big need for tradespeople. Then friends started asking about the workshop, and then they asked us to look at their windows. We became so immersed in those projects that launching a business was the natural next step. It’s kept us so busy that eight years later, we still have not fully restored a window in our home.

When Growth Outruns Your Systems

ICIC: What has been the most challenging moment in your business so far?

Valerie: The 77 percent increase in revenue. Everything we thought we knew about our business changed. We had built systems for a team of three or four, working out of a 24-by-24-foot garage behind our house. Growing that fast, we started making decisions on feeling instead of staying grounded in the numbers. We didn’t think we had time to press pause and work on the business. Ego got in the way, and it was costly, both in time and money, to steer the ship back on course.

Seeing Past the Local Market

ICIC: You’ve participated in different executive education programs, including ICIC’s Building for Growth (BFG), designed specifically for construction-industry businesses. How did BFG change the way you see your business?

Valerie: Before BFG, I was terrified of government contracting and didn’t know about the certifications available to minority-owned businesses. Now I’m no longer intimidated by commercial and government projects.

BFG also helped me see beyond our local market. We offer services, but we also manufacture, and there are needs for our product well beyond our area. In 2025, we were asked to build shutters for a company in Salt Lake City, Utah. We accepted the project, which launched a new manufacturing arm for us. Those shutters are now hanging on Brigham Young’s Lion House as part of a multi-year restoration project.

Learning How AI Can Support Small Business

ICIC: After graduating from BFG, you attended the Los Angeles stop of the Intuit More with AI Tour, a national tour providing hands-on AI education to small businesses, held alongside ICIC’s 2025 Conference. What prompted you to attend, and what lessons have you put into practice since the tour?

Valerie: AI was something I had started to dip my toe into, and it was great to get hands-on experience and learn firsthand how other business owners were using it to grow. I came away with more ways to use it to build systems and complete regularly scheduled tasks. I also learned how to share information in ways that stay private and aren’t used in the public model, so I feel more secure about the details I share.

ICIC: What does that look like day to day?

Valerie: Claude is my daily assistant. It gives me a weekly production analysis, helps with cash flow management, and gives me brutal honesty, gut-checking my feelings against the data. Reclaim.ai holds focus time on my calendar, and another tool sorts my inbox and drafts replies. The biggest shift has been an estimating app that takes what’s in my head and puts it where anyone on my team can create an estimate. My team doesn’t have to wait on me to price a job anymore.

ICIC: Has any AI tool not lived up to your standards?

Valerie: I’ve used Sintra helpers and have mixed feelings. They don’t treat my parameters as guardrails the way other tools do. They’re a great starting point for social media content, but not great when they won’t use our actual photos and want to change them.

ICIC: What would you tell an owner who feels too busy to try any of this?

Valerie: If what you can bill per hour is more than what it costs to pay for a service or someone to take a task off your plate, do it. It’s simple, and yet so hard, because putting a value on your own time is something founders forget to do.

More Time for What Only People Can Do

ICIC: Beyond saving time on everyday tasks, what has AI made possible for you and your team?

Valerie: Clarity. When I start making decisions on feeling, AI checks me against the numbers. It’s become a part of the systems that are pushing us toward our goals, including continuing the trend of increasing revenue a minimum of 45% per year and growing our team to 12 members. The latter is especially important to us because we’re a second-chance shop, and many of the people who work with us are rebuilding their lives after addiction or homelessness.

We’ve found that the ripple effect of helping one person is incredible. Doing something that makes one person’s day softer, easier, or brighter carries so much impact for the community.

Growth You Can Plan For

Valerie and Gus learned the hard way that fast growth without systems can cost almost as much as it earns. The lessons they’d pass on are simple, even if they’re hard to follow: press pause, trust the numbers, put a value on your time, and let the right tools carry the routine work so you can lead. Today those systems support goals bigger than revenue, including building a team of 12 and creating more jobs for neighbors rebuilding their lives.

If your business is growing faster than your systems, ICIC can connect you with the knowledge and community to catch up. Executive education programs like ICIC’s Building for Growth (BFG) are offered at no cost to participants thanks to ICIC’s generous sponsors, and our AI hub provides resources from the Intuit More with AI Tour, training recordings, and stories of how small business owners are using AI. Take the next step toward growth you can plan for.