Start here

This is a small site about removing repeated work from businesses that are too small to have anyone whose job is removing repeated work. Most of the examples come from places with between two and thirty staff: a dental practice, a sign shop, two letting agents, a wedding florist.

There is no product being sold here. I do this as consulting work and I write up the parts that were general enough to be useful to somebody else.

The three questions worth asking first

How often does this actually happen?

People reliably overestimate. Before automating anything, count it for one week. A task that felt daily often turns out to be four times a month, and four times a month rarely pays back a day of setup.

What happens when it goes wrong?

An automation that silently fails is worse than the manual step it replaced, because nobody notices for six weeks. If a thing cannot tell you it broke, do not automate it yet.

Who fixes it when I am not here?

This is the one that gets skipped. If the answer is nobody, keep it simple enough that the answer becomes anybody.

Where to go next

The three guides in the sidebar are the ones people ask about most. They are ordered roughly by how much they pay back for how little setup.