Automate
We make the repeat work run by itself.
Work that happens on a schedule, or on an event, without a person driving it: agents that answer and qualify, documents that get read and filed, systems that exchange records directly, reports that assemble themselves.
- Projects
- 21
- Figures published
- 8
- Free first step
- Automation Map
- Fixed price from
- $1.5K
6 written up on the work page
listed on the work page
built from the process eating the most hours, or the role you are about to post
Hire-Deflection Automation Sprint
Is this you
The week this fixes.
Sentences we hear from the people who end up sending this practice a bottleneck, and what each one is costing while it stays true.
“We are about to hire someone to do all of this.”
A salary spent on work that is mostly rules, not judgment.
“Someone has to copy that into the other system.”
A person with two tabs open, retyping one system into the other.
“The Monday report takes someone the whole morning.”
Numbers pulled out of three systems every week and pasted into the same sheet.
“A form comes in at 7pm on Friday. Someone sees it Monday.”
Customers waiting on whoever opens the inbox next.
What a project covers
Scoped to the smallest useful system, judged against a number.
- Agents that handle a whole interaction: voice, chat or email, with escalation to a person where it belongs
- Document and data processing pipelines: extraction, classification, routing and filing
- Workflow automation between the systems you already run
- Monitoring, so an automation that breaks tells someone instead of silently stopping
What that has looked like
- A voice or chat agent that answers, qualifies, books, and writes the outcome back into the business system
- Document intake that reads, classifies and files what arrives, at volume
- Two systems exchanging records directly instead of through a person
The measures we agree before building
One of these is picked with you at the scoping step, and reported against.
- Hours a week returned to the team
- Cost per processed item (order, ticket, invoice, application)
- Cycle time from request to done, and the error rate along the way
Your own arithmetic
What is the repeat work costing already?
Your numbers, not ours. Move the sliders to whatever is true for your team.
On your numbers, every year
552 hours
12 hours a week across 2 people, over 46 working weeks.
$16,560
At $30 an hour, fully loaded.
Send these numbers with the bottleneckNo charge, no call
Start with the free one.
Each is a document or a sample, written by the person who would do the work. Send one input, get something back you can act on or ignore.
Free
Automation Map
Every task in a role sorted into three columns: software can do this, a person has to, not worth touching either way.
You send: The job posting you are about to run, or a description of the process eating the most hours.
You get back:
- The posting marked up task by task, in three columns
- Which of the software column is worth doing first, and roughly what it costs
- What the seat still needs a person for, so the hire starts further along
Every free first step across the five practices is listed together, if the problem sits between two of them.
Entry points
The ways in, each priced before work starts.
Start with one. None of them requires the next one, and each is small enough to judge on its own.
Hire-Deflection Automation Sprint
Automate the repeatable part of an open ops, admin, marketing, or support role before filling the whole seat.
$1.5K–$3.5K · Fixed price · optional care plan afterwards · 2 to 3 weeks
The Monday Report
The weekly report builds itself, out of the systems the numbers already live in, and lands before anyone asks for it.
$1K–$2.5K · Fixed price · 1 to 2 weeks
System-to-System Sync
Data entered once. Your CRM and accounting stop needing a person to copy between them, and it keeps running after we are gone.
$1.5K–$3K · Fixed price · 1 to 2 weeks
Intake and Inbox Agent
Every inbound form, email and quote request answered and routed the same hour, with anything it cannot judge escalated to a person visibly.
$1.5K–$3K · Fixed price · 2 to 3 weeks
Every price, fixed or by the hour, is agreed before work starts and built the same way: the hours, the tools, and a share of company cost. See how a price is built
The free first step
What the first move looks like.
Examples of what we sent back after a bottleneck came in.
Outreach, inbox, follow-up, voice, and billing, mapped as one systemWhat happened: Proposal only. No signature, no build.
A services company wanted its outreach, inbox triage, follow-up, voice calls, and billing to stop living in five tools that a person bridged by hand.
What it covered
- A diagram of the whole system across an automation platform, the CRM, a voice layer, and payment and accounting
- Acceptance criteria written as measurable targets, so the build could be judged rather than admired
- A two-phase plan, with the second phase contingent on the first being trusted
- The first move
- Automate intake and follow-up first; voice and billing wait until the classification is trusted.
Billing reconciliation for a small clinical practiceWhat happened: Proposal prepared; no award recorded.
A psychology practice reconciled its billing by hand every month, and had a budget that ruled out a platform.
What it covered
- The monthly reconciliation as it actually ran, step by step
- The hours it cost, in the client's own estimate
- What a small automation would take over, and what should stay manual
- The first move
- One small automation inside the budget, priced as a build rather than a subscription.
Lead intake, qualification, follow-up, and booking, in two phasesWhat happened: Proposed; no award.
A company wanted inbound leads qualified and followed up without a person watching the inbox, and booked when they were ready.
What it covered
- A workflow-platform design for intake, qualification rules, follow-up sequences, and booking
- Phase one and phase two, with the second only after the first had run
- An hour estimate rather than a fixed price at that stage, and the reason why
- The first move
- Phase one: intake and qualification only.
Guest-service automation for a hospitality operatorWhat happened: Proposed.
A hospitality operator wanted routine guest requests handled automatically, without the guest noticing a machine.
What it covered
- The requests that could be automated, and the ones that need a person on the first reply
- The escalation path, written before the automation
- A statement of work scoped to the routine requests only
- The first move
- Automate the routine requests; route everything else to a person, visibly.
A spreadsheet-validation demo built before the proposalWhat happened: Demo and proposal; no award recorded.
A manufacturing prospect asked for a recorded demo of the tool. There was no tool: the work was custom, so a working front end was built to show what it would do.
What it covered
- A front end that takes a spreadsheet upload, runs validation rules (an empty product code, a duplicate identifier), and hands off to workflow templates
- An indicative proposal with two options and a work breakdown by activity
- An explicit caveat that requirements had been gathered by email and no formal discovery had happened
- The first move
- Something to click before anything to sign.
The work
What this looks like shipped.
A high-volume hotel pricing-data system
169 properties, same day
Scheduled collection, proxy rotation, retry, and anti-blocking strategy, and the operational work of keeping a high-volume pipeline healthy, without adding headcount to maintain the feed.
A retail catalog pipeline that keeps a Shopify store current
Scrapes Costco product data on a schedule, normalizes and stores it, and syncs price and stock to Shopify.
Read the case study
A café operations system: orders, inventory, shifts, loyalty
20-table schema
An internal product built in March 2026: point of sale, the barista queue, an inventory ledger, recipes, loyalty, shifts, and void reversals across a 20-table schema, designed against a 22-entity domain model.
Public-records search and retrieval, automated
Drives the Hamilton County clerk-of-court foreclosure search with Selenium and retrieves each matching PDF, retrying failed downloads: a job otherwise done by hand, one case at a time.
Google Sheets to PDF workflow automation
A small automation, built in August 2023, that keeps Google Sheets as the working interface, reads the worksheet records through the Sheets API with gspread, and writes structured PDF output with FPDF.
A cold-outreach engine we ran on our own pipeline first
247 qualified leads
Contact sourcing from Apollo, verification, warmed secondary sending domains, sequenced copy, reply triage, and weekly deliverability reporting. We ran it at scale on our own program through the second half of 2025, then for a partner under their brand, as a pilot for a client, and on hourly contracts.
Read the case study
6 more automation projects
What else we have built in this area, and what changed as a result.
Engagements in this catalogue, described without numbers and, in most cases, without the client: they were built under confidentiality or under another firm's brand. For numbers with sources behind them, see the work page.
Supplier invoices, read and filed without a person
Invoices arrived as PDF attachments from dozens of suppliers, each in its own layout, and were keyed into the accounting system by hand.
What we built
- Mail-drop intake that picks up attachments and classifies them by supplier
- Field extraction per supplier layout, with a confidence threshold
- A review queue for anything below the threshold, so nothing is silently wrong
- Posting into the accounting system with the original document attached
What changed
Keying invoices became reviewing exceptions, and month-end stopped being a backlog-clearing exercise.
A CRM that stopped needing to be tidied
Duplicate records, stale ownership, and half-filled fields meant reporting was rebuilt by hand every month and nobody trusted the pipeline number.
What we built
- Deduplication and merge rules that run continuously rather than in an annual clean-up
- Enrichment from the systems that already knew the answer
- Validation at write time, so bad records stop being created
- A standing report built from the CRM instead of from a spreadsheet export
What changed
The monthly clean-up stopped being scheduled work, and the pipeline number became one people quoted without checking.
Rota building, from a whole afternoon to a review
A manager spent an afternoon a week building a rota in a spreadsheet, working around availability, certifications, and hours caps held mostly in their head.
What we built
- Constraints written down as rules: availability, qualifications, maximum hours, rest gaps
- A generated draft rota that satisfies the hard rules and flags the soft ones
- Manual override kept first-class, because the manager knows things the rules do not
- Publication and change notification to staff
What changed
Rota building became reviewing a draft, and the rules stopped living only in one manager's memory.
Audit evidence collected continuously instead of in a panic
Every audit cycle began with weeks of screenshotting settings and chasing colleagues for confirmations that a control was in place.
What we built
- Scheduled collection of the evidence the auditor asks for, from the systems that hold it
- Timestamped storage, so evidence is dated rather than reconstructed
- Exception alerts when a control drifts, rather than discovery at audit time
- An export in the shape the auditor already expects
What changed
Audit preparation stopped being a project, and control drift surfaced when it happened rather than months later.
A product business paying for tools it had stopped using
An ecommerce operation had accumulated overlapping subscriptions and manual steps, each added to solve a problem that had since moved.
What we built
- A map of what every tool and manual step was actually doing
- Consolidation onto the systems that earned their place
- Automation of the hand-offs that had been holding the stack together
- Cancellation of what was left, with the workflow proven first
What changed
The operation ran on fewer moving parts, and the remaining ones were connected rather than bridged by a person.
Two workshops on a cash-flow forecast assembled by hand every week
A weekly treasury forecast was built by hand from two reports out of a freight-management system, by a team in one country for a sponsor in another, and nobody had written down how it actually worked.
What we built
- A discovery call and a written intent summary agreed with the sponsor before any workshop ran
- Two structured workshops walking the receivables and payables reports the forecast is built from
- A question list and a bilingual non-disclosure agreement, with a Spanish-language session arranged, because the people who do the work and the people who fund it did not share a first language
- A written discovery output naming what could be automated and what could not
What changed
The forecast's real inputs were written down for the first time, and the decision about whether to build was taken against them rather than against a demonstration.
Elsewhere on the site
Read next
- PrototypesLabsWorking prototypes on sample data, including the kind of surface this practice builds. Nothing there is a client system.
- The workThe workCase pages, the systems that could not be named, and every figure with its source.
- The workThe evidence registerEvery record behind the work page, what kind of evidence each is, and what is withheld.
Where to next
The free first step: an Automation Map.
Send the process eating the most hours, or the role you are about to post.