Automations
The work you do by hand that a system should be doing.
Every business I look at has three or four jobs somebody does manually every week because that is how it has always been done. Re-typing a lead into a spreadsheet. Chasing a quote nobody followed up. Pulling the same report on the first of the month. None of it needs a person.
The work
What you get
- Lead routing. An inquiry arrives and lands with the right person, tagged and timestamped, before anyone opens a laptop.
- Follow-up that actually happens. The second and third touch that everybody agrees matters and nobody does. Set once, runs forever.
- Reporting on a schedule. The numbers you care about, assembled and sent, without anyone building a deck.
- Content pipelines. Draft, format, publish. I built one that produces full-length books, so a month of service pages is not a stretch.
- Connecting things that do not talk. Your form, your CRM, your calendar, your inbox. Usually the fix is plumbing, not software.
- Built on what you already pay for. I would rather wire up your existing tools than sell you a platform.
What it looks like in practice
Three examples
The enquiry nobody saw
A form on a contact page sends to one inbox that one person checks. They go on holiday. Nine days of enquiries sit unread. The fix is not a new website, it is routing that copies every submission to two people, tags it by service, and sends the customer an acknowledgement inside a minute so they stop shopping around while they wait.
The quote that went cold
Most businesses send a quote and then wait. The second and third follow-up is the one that wins the job, and it is the one that never happens because everyone is busy. Three scheduled messages, written in your voice, going out on day two, day six and day fourteen unless the job is marked won. It takes an afternoon to build and it runs for years.
The report nobody enjoys building
Somebody spends the first morning of every month copying numbers between tabs. That is twelve mornings a year to produce something that could assemble itself and land in your inbox before you are awake. Same numbers, no deck, no person.
Asked often
Do I need to buy new software?
Usually not much, and usually cheap. Most of what I build runs on tools you already pay for. I would rather wire up your existing stack than move you onto a platform you will be renting forever.
What if it breaks?
Automations fail quietly, which is the danger. A broken one does not throw an error, it just stops, and you find out three weeks later when you wonder why nobody called back. Anything I build tells you when it has stopped rather than failing silently.
Where should I start?
Whatever you currently do by hand every single week. That is almost always the one worth doing first, because the time it gives back compounds immediately and you can feel it.
How long does it take to build one?
A single automation, like routing form submissions or acknowledging an enquiry, is usually a day or two. Something that stitches several systems together takes longer, mostly because of waiting on logins and permissions rather than the build itself.
What does it cost?
I quote the job, not an hourly rate. A first automation is typically a few hundred dollars and pays for itself in the first month it stops you losing an enquiry. If I do not think it will pay for itself, I will say so.
Is this going to replace one of my people?
Almost never, and that is not what I sell it as. It replaces the parts of their week they resent: re-typing, chasing, formatting. What tends to happen is the same person handles more work without working later.
Will automatic follow-up sound like a robot?
It will if you let it. I write the messages to sound like the business rather than the software, and the automatic one is usually just an acknowledgement that buys you the time to answer properly yourself.
Does this work with the tools I already use?
Most of the time, yes. Forms, CRMs, calendars, inboxes and spreadsheets almost all talk to each other now, and where they do not there is usually a bridge. The fix is nearly always plumbing rather than new software.
Tell me what is not working
No audit funnel and no discovery call about a discovery call. Tell me what you keep doing by hand and I will tell you whether it is worth automating.
Start a project →