Services / AI & automation
Get your week back from the jobs a computer should be doing
Not chatbots for the sake of it. The boring, repetitive admin that quietly eats a day a week — quotes, invoices, chasing, copying the same information between two systems that don't talk to each other.
Priced per job
Scoped against a real business case, and quoted in writing.
The approach
Find what it costs before deciding what to build
This is the part of my old job that transfers most directly. On large programmes, nobody was allowed to build anything until someone had worked out what the current process cost the business — in hours, in errors, in money tied up waiting.
Almost nobody does this for small firms. They get sold a tool, and then discover the tool solved a problem that was costing them forty minutes a month.
So the first thing I do is boring: work out where your week actually goes, put a number on the worst offender, and only then talk about what to do. Sometimes the answer is a £12-a-month off-the-shelf tool and twenty minutes of setup. That's a good outcome, and I'll tell you when it's the answer.
Things worth automating
- Enquiries arriving as emails that get retyped into a spreadsheet
- Quotes rebuilt from scratch each time when 80% is identical
- Chasing unpaid invoices by hand
- Booking confirmations and reminders typed out one by one
- The same information keyed into two systems that should talk
- Pulling numbers together by hand for a monthly report
- Sorting and answering the same twenty enquiry types every week
Straight talk about AI
Where it genuinely helps, and where it's being oversold
Genuinely useful
- Reading messy incoming text — emails, forms, notes — and pulling structured information out of it
- Drafting routine replies for you to check and send
- Turning site notes or voice memos into a written record
- Summarising a pile of documents into the bits that matter
- First-pass sorting: which of these needs me today?
Oversold, in my view
- Chatbots answering customers unsupervised, when your customers would rather ring you
- Automatically published content — it reads like it, and search engines increasingly agree
- Anything making a decision that costs money without a human seeing it first
- Replacing a person you actually need, in a business your size
A rule I stick to
A person sees anything that goes to a customer or moves money, before it goes. Automation that runs unsupervised in a small business is how you find out in March that something has been quietly wrong since November. Save the time on the preparation, not on the checking.
How this usually goes
01
A look at where the week goes
Usually half a day. Often the most valuable part, whatever you do next.
02
A number on the worst offender
Hours a month, and what those hours are worth to you.
03
The cheapest thing that fixes it
Which is frequently an existing tool, not something built.
04
Build, test, hand over
Documented so you're not dependent on me to keep it running.
When not to hire me for this
- Your website doesn't work yet. Automation is a later-stage problem. Fix the thing that brings in customers first.
- The process changes constantly. Automating a moving target produces something that breaks weekly. Settle the process, then automate it.
- You want AI because it's AI. If we can't put a number on what it saves, it's a hobby project and you shouldn't pay for it.
- The job takes ten minutes a month. Leave it alone. Seriously.
What's eating your week?
Tell me on a free call. Often I can tell you within half an hour whether it's worth automating and roughly what it'd take — including when the answer is "there's a tool for that, here's the name of it".
