Custom automation
The jobs your team does by hand, done by software instead.
Copying a form into a spreadsheet. Chasing a customer for documents. Sending the same five emails after every install. We connect the tools you already pay for so this work happens by itself — correctly, in the right order, whether or not anybody is in the office.
- Works with the tools you already have
- First automation live in 1–2 weeks
- Typically 10–20 hours a week returned
- One-click off switch on everything
In plain English
What “automation” actually means.
Take one thing your office does every day. Say a quote request arrives through your website. Right now somebody reads the email, copies the name and address into a spreadsheet, adds the customer to the CRM, checks the calendar, writes a reply, and sets themselves a reminder to chase it on Friday. Six steps, about eleven minutes, twenty times a week. That is roughly four hours of somebody’s salary, every week, spent retyping things.
An automation is a piece of software that does those six steps the moment the form arrives — in about four seconds, in the same order every time, and without forgetting the Friday chase because Thursday was busy.
Most of it is not artificial intelligence doing anything mysterious. Most of it is plumbing: connecting the tools you already use so information moves between them without a human retyping it. Where actual judgement is needed — reading a messy email, writing a sensible reply, sorting a pile of documents — that is where AI does the part a simple script cannot.
The point is not the technology. The point is that the work still gets done on the days when your office manager is off sick, and that nothing slips because somebody was on the phone when they should have been typing.
Real examples
What we actually build.
These are real automations running in service businesses today. Yours will be a variation on one or more of them.
Quote request to booked survey
Web form or phone call comes in → the customer is added to your CRM → a survey slot is offered from the live calendar → confirmation and directions are sent → a reminder goes out the day before → your surveyor gets the address and the notes on their phone that morning.
Saves ~11 min per enquiry
Document chasing
The system asks the customer for the bills, roof photographs, permits or ID you need, reminds them every two days until they actually send them, files everything in the right folder under the right job, and tells you the moment the file is complete.
Saves ~2 hours per job
Quote follow-up
Every quote that has not been answered gets a polite follow-up on day three, day seven and day twenty-one — by email, SMS or WhatsApp — until the customer says yes or no. This one alone typically recovers 10–15% of quotes you had written off.
Recovers 10–15% of dead quotes
Job to invoice to paid
When a job is marked complete, the invoice is raised from the job sheet, sent to the customer, and chased automatically if it goes unpaid — and your accountant receives the whole month in one file without you assembling it.
Cuts payment times by weeks
Review collection
Three days after handover the customer gets a message asking for a Google review with a direct one-tap link. Happy customers go to Google; anybody unhappy is routed to you first, before they write anything public.
More reviews, fewer bad ones
Reporting that writes itself
Every Monday at seven in the morning: leads this week, quotes sent, value won, jobs booked, and which advertising channel each lead came from. One message on your phone. No spreadsheet to open and nobody to ask.
Saves a half-day a month
Suppliers and stock
Purchase orders raised from the confirmed job list, delivery dates tracked automatically, and an alert the moment a part that a booked installation depends on is running late — while there is still time to do something about it.
Fewer postponed installs
Onboarding a won customer
Contract sent for electronic signature, deposit invoice raised, welcome pack sent, project folder created, the crew notified and the job added to the schedule — all triggered by one click on “won”.
Saves ~45 min per customer
The work still gets done on the day everyone is off.
How we decide what to automate
We do not guess. We count.
The audit is free and you keep the output whether or not you hire us. It is a useful document on its own.
- 01
The audit call — free, 45 minutes
We ask you and one or two of your team what they do repeatedly and roughly how long each thing takes. We write down every repeated task with a number of minutes and a frequency next to it. Most owners are genuinely surprised by this list.
- 02
The shortlist
We multiply those out into hours per month and rank them by hours saved against effort to build. You get that ranked list in writing. If you want to take it to somebody else, or do the easy ones yourself, that is fine.
- 03
One first, not ten
We build the top item, get it live, and let you watch real hours come back before you commit to anything else. Nobody should buy an automation programme on the strength of a promise.
- 04
Then the rest, in order
Each new automation is built, tested against your real data, and handed over with a one-page plain-English description of exactly what it does, what it never does, and how to switch it off.
What we connect
We build on top of what you already pay for.
We would rather connect your existing software than ask you to migrate everything, because migrations are where automation projects die. If a tool has a modern connection we can use it — and if it does not, we can usually work around it through its exports, its emails or its database.
Where your leads arrive
- Website forms
- Phone calls
- Telegram
- Instagram & Facebook
- Google Ads
Where you keep customers
- HubSpot
- Pipedrive
- Zoho
- Salesforce
- Airtable
- Google Sheets
- Notion
Calendars & scheduling
- Google Calendar
- Outlook / Microsoft 365
- Calendly
- Field service apps
Money & documents
- Xero
- QuickBooks
- Stripe
- DocuSign
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
Staying in control
Automation you can watch, pause and understand.
The reason owners distrust automation is almost never that it does the wrong thing. It is that it does something invisibly and nobody finds out for a month. We design against that specifically.
- Everything is written down in plain language
- You get a one-page description of each automation: what starts it, what it does step by step, what it will never do, and who to contact. No diagrams full of jargon.
- There is an off switch
- Any automation can be paused by you in one click, and everything falls back to the way you do it today. You are never in a position where the software is the only thing that knows how the job works.
- Nothing goes out unseen at first
- New automations run in draft mode for the first week: they prepare the email, the quote or the invoice and then wait for a human to press send. You see the quality before you decide to trust it.
- You are told when it fails
- If a connected tool is down or a step fails, you get a message saying what broke and what did not get done, so a human can pick it up. Silent failure is the thing that ruins trust, so we never allow it.
- It belongs to you, not to us
- Automations run inside your own accounts. If you stop working with us they keep running, and you have the documentation to hand to anybody else.
FAQ
What owners ask us about automation.
In our experience it does not, and we would be careful of anybody who promises it will. What it removes is the part of the day your team hates. The usual outcome is the same people handling roughly twice the work without you hiring again as you grow.
Find out what this would look like in your business.
A free 30-minute call. Tell us where the time and the leads are going, and you will get a straight answer: what we would automate first, what it would cost, and whether it is worth doing at all.
Or explore the other two systems