HomeAI automation
Automation that pays for itself in hours.
Most small businesses lose a day a week to work that a computer should be doing. Not the interesting parts — the re-typing, the chasing, the moving of the same number from one screen to another. That is what I build away.
01 What it looks like
Five jobs worth taking off a person.
Automation gets sold in abstractions. Here is the concrete version — the shape of the work before, and what it becomes afterwards.
Quotes & proposals
- Before
- Someone opens last month’s quote, saves a copy, changes the name and the numbers, and hopes they caught every one.
- After
- Figures come from the job record, the document builds itself, and a person checks it before it goes anywhere.
Chasing & follow-up
- Before
- Follow-ups happen when someone remembers, which means the quiet weeks are the ones where nobody gets chased.
- After
- Every enquiry gets its sequence, and it stops the moment they reply. Nobody falls through because Thursday was busy.
Data entry & re-keying
- Before
- The same details typed into the form, then the spreadsheet, then the accounting package. Three chances to get it wrong.
- After
- Entered once, and everything downstream updates. The month-end numbers agree because they came from the same place.
Inbox triage
- Before
- A shared inbox where the urgent thing sits under forty newsletters until someone scrolls far enough.
- After
- Sorted by what it is and who it’s for, with a draft reply waiting on the routine ones for a person to approve.
Reporting
- Before
- A Monday morning spent exporting, pasting and re-formatting so somebody can look at a number for ten seconds.
- After
- It’s already built when they open it, from live data, and it doesn’t break when a column moves.
Documents in, data out
- Before
- Invoices, surveys and forms arrive as PDFs, and somebody reads them and types what matters into a system.
- After
- Read and extracted automatically, with anything the model is unsure about flagged for a human rather than guessed.
02 Where it starts
An audit before a quote, always.
I won’t price automation off a conversation about software. I need to see how the work actually happens first — usually that takes an hour, and it is where most of the value is found.
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01
Where the week goes
We walk through the repeated jobs and roughly how long each one takes. No tooling talk yet.
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02
Three candidates
I come back with the three worth automating first, ranked by hours returned against effort to build.
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03
Fixed price
Scope in writing, price agreed before anything is built. If it grows, we agree that separately.
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04
Built and handed over
Running on your accounts and your keys, documented well enough for somebody else to maintain.
- A person approves anything customer-facing
- Runs on your accounts
- NDA on request
- White-label for agencies
03 Questions
The ones I get asked first.
How long does something like this take?
Most first projects are one to two weeks from agreed scope to running. The audit that comes before it is usually a call and a couple of days of my thinking. If a job can’t be done in that window, I’ll say so and we’ll cut it into pieces that can.
What does it cost?
Fixed price, agreed in writing before anything starts, based on what the audit finds. I don’t bill by the hour for build work — you shouldn’t carry the risk of my estimate being wrong.
Do I have to change the software we already use?
Usually not. Most of this work is getting the tools you already pay for to talk to each other. Replacing a system you know is a much bigger, more disruptive project than making it behave, and I’ll tell you if that’s genuinely the right call rather than assuming it.
Will AI send things to my customers without me seeing them?
Not unless you explicitly ask for that, and I’d push back if you did. The default is that a model drafts and a person approves. Anything that goes out under your name should have had a human look at it, particularly in the first months while you’re still learning to trust it.
What happens when it breaks?
Things that touch other people’s APIs do break eventually — a format changes, a token expires. Everything I build logs what it did and fails loudly rather than quietly doing nothing. You’ll know it stopped, and because it’s documented and on your accounts, either I or somebody else can fix it.
Am I locked in to you?
No, and that’s deliberate. It runs on your accounts, your keys and your hosting, and the handover includes documentation written for whoever comes next. If you want to take it in-house or hand it to another developer, that should be a normal Tuesday, not a rescue.
Do you work on site?
I’m in Coventry and happy to come to you anywhere in Coventry or Birmingham for the audit and the handover — those two go much better in a room. The build itself is remote.
Do you work with agencies?
Yes, white-label as standard. Fixed price, NDA signed, and your client never hears my name. I’m capacity on your bench, not a competitor coming for your accounts.
04 Next
Start with the audit.
Tell me what your team repeats and roughly how often. I’ll come back with what’s worth automating first, what it costs, and what it gives you back.