What this actually is
Every business has a pipe with a clog in it. Enquiries come in and sit unanswered until Wednesday. Invoices go out late because nobody had a spare hour. The same spreadsheet gets updated by hand every Friday night. Nothing is broken exactly, it is just slow, and the slowness quietly costs money.
Automation is finding that clog and clearing it. In practice it means connecting the tools you already use so a job that took you forty minutes of clicking happens on its own, correctly, every time, without you remembering to do it.
I am not here to sell you the shiniest technology. Half the jobs I look at turn out to need one small connection rather than a big system, and I will tell you that even though the small job pays me less. The point is to get the hours back, not to install something impressive.
What actually gets automated
- Enquiry handling. A message lands on WhatsApp, the website form or your inbox. It gets logged in one place, answered straight away with the details people always ask for, and flagged to you.
- Follow up. If nobody replies in two days, a polite nudge goes out. This is the single most common place small businesses lose work, and it is usually the cheapest thing to fix.
- Quotes and paperwork. Standard quotes, job sheets and confirmation emails drafted from your own wording, ready for you to check and send.
- Booking and reminders. Appointments into the calendar, reminders the day before, and a route back if somebody needs to move it. Fewer no shows without you chasing anyone.
- Invoicing and chasing. Invoice raised when the job is marked done, gentle reminders when it goes past due.
- Reporting. The numbers you compile by hand every month, built and sent to you automatically.
- Lead lists. Finding businesses that fit what you sell, with contact details, cleaned and exported ready to work through.
- Content and posting prep. Captions, descriptions and per platform versions prepared so posting is one tap rather than one hour.
Who it is for
- Sole traders and tradespeople who are on the tools all day and doing admin at ten at night.
- Small teams where one person has quietly become the human glue between four different apps.
- Service businesses with a steady flow of enquiries and no system holding them, so some fall through.
- Anyone who says "I just do that manually every week" and then laughs about it. That sentence is where the money is.
What you get
- A short audit of where your time actually goes, written down, before anything is built.
- A simple map of the automation in plain English, so you understand it rather than trusting it.
- The build, connected to the tools you already pay for wherever possible.
- Testing on real cases, not just a demo that works once. It has to survive the awkward ones.
- A handover walkthrough and written notes, so you or your staff can see what is running and switch parts off.
- A check in after it has been live for a while, because the first version is never the last version.
What it costs
Automation is priced to the job and quoted after I have seen the work. I am not going to publish a number here, because one connection between two apps and a full enquiry to invoice system are not the same piece of work, and any figure on this page would be wrong for one of you.
What I will promise is how the number behaves. You get one fixed price for an agreed scope. It does not move because the job turned out to be harder than I thought. If you want more added later, we price that separately and you decide.
Some automations run on tools that charge their own monthly fee, and some run at no ongoing cost at all. I will always tell you which one you are looking at, and I default to the free or cheap option unless the paid one genuinely earns its keep. Spending your money on subscriptions you do not need is not a service.
If the honest answer is that an automation will save you twenty minutes a month, I will tell you it is not worth paying for. That happens.
How it works
Find the clog
A conversation about your week. What you dread, what you forget, what you do twice. I am listening for the jobs that are frequent and boring, because those are the ones worth automating. The rare complicated ones usually are not.
Pick one thing
We start with the single job that costs you the most time or the most lost work. One clear win first, proven, before anything bigger gets built. It keeps the cost down and it means you see the value quickly.
Map it before building it
You get the plan in plain English: what triggers it, what it does, what it never does without asking you, what it costs. You approve that before I write a line of anything.
Build and test on real cases
Built, then run against your actual messy real world examples. The odd enquiry with no phone number. The customer who replies six weeks later. If it only works on tidy examples it is not finished.
Hand it over properly
A walkthrough on a call, written notes, and a clear way to turn it off. You should never be in a position where something is running in your business and only I understand it.
Then the next one
Once the first is genuinely earning its keep, we look at the next clog. Or we do not, and you still have your hours back. No obligation to keep buying.
Questions people actually ask
Do I have to change the tools I already use?
Usually not. The whole idea is to connect what you have rather than move you onto something new, because new tools mean new habits and new bills. If something you use genuinely cannot connect to anything, I will say so and give you the options rather than quietly swapping you over.
I do not know what to automate. Can you tell me?
That is normally my job, not yours. You talk me through a normal week and I listen for the jobs that are frequent, boring and rule based. Those are the ones worth doing. If nothing in your week fits that description, I will tell you honestly that you do not need me yet.
What happens if it breaks?
Things do break, usually because an app you use changed something on their end. That is why automations get built to fail loudly rather than quietly, so you find out from a notification rather than from an angry customer. Fixes for anything I built are part of the deal in the period we agree, and after that it is a small job rather than a rebuild.
How do you charge for it?
One fixed price for an agreed scope, quoted after I have seen the work. Not by the hour, because you should be paying for the result rather than for how long it took me. If you want ongoing changes and monitoring after it is live, that is a separate arrangement we agree at the start.
Will it send things to my customers without me seeing them?
Only if you want it to. Anything that goes out with your name on it can be set to wait for your approval, and I will usually recommend that for the first few weeks so you can see what it would have said. Once you trust it, you can let more of it run on its own.
Do you hand it over, or do you keep running it?
Whichever suits you, decided at the start rather than at the end. Some people want the finished thing handed over with notes so their own team runs it. Others would rather I stay connected and keep improving it. Both are normal and the price reflects which one you pick.
Is this the same as the AI assistant work?
They overlap but they are not the same. Automation connects tools so a fixed process runs itself. An AI assistant adds memory and judgement on top, so it can handle things that are not identical every time. Plenty of businesses only need the first one, and I will tell you if that is you.
Get your evenings back
Fifteen minutes on a call. Tell me what you do manually every week and I will tell you whether it is worth automating.