Automations
Stop being your company's operating system.
Quotes go out when you write them. Jobs run when you confirm them. Invoices leave when you remember. The fastest work we do exists to break exactly that, and it goes live in weeks, not quarters.
The symptom
The business runs through your phone.
Here is the test: could you take four days off without the schedule slipping, a quote going stale, or an invoice sitting unsent? If the answer is no, your company has an operating system — it is you, and it does not scale, take holidays, or survive a flu.
Most owners try to hire their way out first, but an admin inherits your chaos instead of fixing it. The problem was never effort — it's that information lives in your head and moves only when you move it.
What we build
The four leaks, plugged first.
Quoting and estimating
Price books, templates and rules that turn a site visit or an email thread into a sent quote the same day. We built this for the landscaping company one of us co-owns; estimates that took an evening now take minutes, and follow-ups send themselves.
Scheduling and dispatch
Jobs assigned by rules you set, calendars that update themselves, and crews or staff who know tomorrow's plan without phoning you tonight. Changes ripple through instead of through you.
Invoicing and collections
Invoices generated the moment work completes, reminders that escalate politely on a schedule, and payments reconciled without anyone re-typing a number that already exists in another system.
Data bridges
The end of re-keying: store to books, forms to CRM, field notes to job records. Every record typed twice is paid for twice, so we wire the systems you keep to pass data instead of chores.
The daily digest
One morning summary instead of thirty status calls: what sold, what is scheduled, what is stuck, what needs a decision from you. Owners stop being the query engine for their own company.
AI in the narrow places
Reading supplier PDFs, extracting order details from email, drafting replies for review, categorising expenses. Reliable, boring uses that remove typing — not a chatbot bolted to your homepage.
What it costs and how long
Fixed prices, weeks not quarters.
Every automation is a fixed price quoted after the free day, typically live within two to four weeks. No hourly billing — our hours are our problem, and fixed pricing means speed works in both our favours.
What moves the price: how many systems a workflow touches, how many edge cases your process genuinely has, how many approvals must stay human. Ambition doesn't move it — the thing costing you ten hours a week is usually the cheapest project on the list, which is why it goes first.
Some of this work is scaffolding, and the proposal says so line by line. Paying a little for scaffolding beats paying forever for a bottleneck.
The arithmetic
Run it with your numbers.
Ten hours at $150 is our polite estimate. Yours is more useful — set the sliders to last week, priced at what your selling and hiring time is worth.
Your numbers
What it computes to
What it costs a year
$78,000
A payroll line that never appears on payroll.
Hours a year spent being the machine
520 hrs
The first automations typically retire the worst of these hours within a month of the free day.
What it looks like
The first month, week by week.
Week 1
The free day. We work inside your systems, ship the first small fixes on the spot, and hand you the diagnosis in writing. If you want more, you get a fixed price per automation, ranked by hours returned per dollar.
Weeks 2–3
The worst leak goes live — usually quoting or invoicing, because those bleed cash and evenings at the same time. Your team keeps working as they always have; the automation meets them where they are.
Week 4
The second automation lands, and the daily digest starts arriving: what sold, what is scheduled, what is stuck, what needs you. The phone gets noticeably quieter.
The test
You take a Friday off. Nothing slips. That is the deliverable the invoices are pointing at, and it is the measure we ask you to hold us to.
Why us, on this specifically
We automated the company closest to home first.
One of us is a partner in LawnJunkie, an Ontario landscaping company, and with its owners' blessing it runs on automations and software we built: estimating, crew scheduling, job costing, routing. When a frost delay reshuffles twenty jobs, the system reshuffles with it. A founder lives with that work every day, which is a quality bar no portfolio can fake.
Before that we grew a Shopify business from zero to $30M — three founders operate at that scale only by refusing to be the router. We're not selling a theory. We're selling the thing we did, twice.
Questions we actually get
Fair questions, straight answers.
Which tools do you work with?
The ones you already have. QuickBooks, Shopify, Google and Microsoft, spreadsheets, and the industry systems your trade runs on. Where there is an API we use it; where there is not, we either build the bridge or tell you plainly that a step stays manual and why.
Will automations break when my process changes?
Some will, and we name those up front. Part of speed-one work is scaffolding: it saves you ten hours a week now and gets replaced when the real system lands. An automation that served eight months and then retired did its job completely. The foundations underneath are built to outlast the process changes.
Do we need new software before automating?
No. Speed one works with the stack you have, because replacing tools mid-quarter is exactly the disruption you hired us to avoid. If the stack itself turns out to be the problem, that is a speed-two conversation, and we will say so in plain words rather than automating around a lost cause.
Where does AI actually fit in this?
In the narrow places where it is reliably good: reading documents, extracting data from emails and PDFs, drafting messages for review, categorising records. It compresses coordination and typing. It does not compress training or change management, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
What does an automation cost?
A fixed price per automation, quoted after the free day, not an hourly meter. Pricing before we have seen your systems is how bad specs get written, so we do not do it. What moves the price is the number of systems touched and the edge cases, not the ambition.
What happens when an automation fails at 2 a.m.?
It fails loudly and safely. Every automation we ship has monitoring, an alert that reaches a human, and a manual fallback — the same path your team used before it existed. Silent failure is the only unacceptable kind, so we design for the bad night first and the demo second.
The next step
Start with the free day.
One day inside your systems, real optimisations delivered, and a written diagnosis. No invoice, no obligation, no slide deck. It is the fastest way for both of us to find out if there's a project here.