Stop hiring for work your systems should handle.

Back-office systems for service firms: the path a job takes from enquiry to paid invoice. Intake, dispatch, scheduling, work orders, client comms, invoicing and the sync into your accounts.

In practice that is n8n for the automation, Airtable or Postgres for the data, and a Next.js portal when your staff or customers need somewhere to log in.

Service firms doing real volume where a job crosses several tools and several people before it gets paid. Field services, inspections, scanning and capture, photography, trades, studios, agencies, tutoring.

It is a poor fit if you have fewer than a handful of jobs a month, or if your work is genuinely bespoke every time. Automation pays back on repetition.

Three things. We run a service business on this stack ourselves, so we have felt the failure modes. We build on infrastructure you own rather than renting you a per-task vendor. And we instrument the failures, which is the part that usually gets skipped.

Most automation work looks fine on day one. The question is whether you hear about a break before your client does.

An Automation Audit starts at $500 and is yours to keep whether or not we continue. A fixed-scope Ops System Build typically lands between $5,000 and $15,000 depending on how many flows and integrations are in play.

Run and Maintain is a monthly retainer, priced against the size of what is live. Every build is scoped to the firm, so the fit call is where a real number comes from.

Because per-task pricing punishes you exactly when you grow, and because a vendor who owns your ops owns your leverage. Your code, your data and the server it runs on stay yours.

If you ever want to stop working with us, the system keeps running and someone else can pick it up.

An audit is usually one to two weeks. A first system build is commonly four to eight weeks depending on scope, and we ship in phases so value lands before the end.

Migrations off an existing stack run old and new side by side until the new path is proven, so there is no day where your operations stop.

No, and that constraint drives the sequencing. Nothing gets switched off until its replacement has been running against real data. Cutovers are phased, reversible and scheduled with you.

For one client we ported a live stack scenario by scenario with no client-facing data loss.

You get told. Every build ships with failure alerting on the money-critical steps and watchdogs on the ones that fail quietly, plus a live status page for the whole flow.

Silent failure is the actual risk in this work. A workflow that stopped three weeks ago and nobody noticed is worse than no workflow at all.

No. You need one person who knows how the business actually runs, including the exceptions and the awkward cases. That knowledge is what the system encodes.

Day-to-day the system is used through forms, a portal and your existing tools. Nobody on your team edits a workflow.

Some. APIs change, vendors deprecate endpoints, and your process evolves. Most months nothing needs doing; occasionally something does.

You can take that on yourself, since you own everything, or put it on a Run and Maintain retainer.

It sits on infrastructure you own, with credentials held in environment secrets rather than pasted into a vendor UI. We do not copy client data out to third-party tools that are not already part of your stack.

Access to your systems is scoped, and handed over in full at the end of an engagement.

Book a 20-minute fit call. No pitch: we ask where the admin is leaking, and tell you honestly whether this is worth doing.

If it is, the next step is a paid audit that maps what to automate first. You keep that document either way.