Business automation for small business
Most small businesses don't need new software. They need the software they already pay for to talk to itself, so the same job details stop getting typed in four times.
How I build it
I build on Make.com, with the Claude API doing the parts that need judgement rather than rules. Make.com handles the plumbing: when this happens in one system, do that in another. It connects to the things you already use — Google Calendar, Gmail, Xero, ServiceM8, Stripe, Sheets, Airtable, Slack, your website forms — without you migrating anything.
The Claude API comes in where a rule would break. Reading a messy email and pulling out the job address. Deciding whether an enquiry is a quote request or a complaint. Writing a follow-up in your tone rather than a template that reads like a template. That's the difference between an automation that saves you time and one you end up babysitting.
Every workflow gets error handling and a notification when something fails, because a silent automation is worse than no automation. If a step breaks, you hear about it that day, and I fix it.
Examples of what gets built
These are the workflows small operators ask for most. Yours will be some version of one of them, or a few chained together.
- Enquiry to calendar: a website form or SMS enquiry becomes a calendar booking with the address and job notes already filled in.
- Job to invoice: mark a job complete and the invoice is drafted in Xero with the right line items, ready for you to send.
- Quote follow-up: a quote that hasn't been answered in five days triggers a polite nudge written in your words.
- Review requests: a paid invoice sends a review link a day later, once, and never to the same customer twice.
- Supplier emails: order confirmations get read, the delivery date extracted, and the job schedule updated.
- Weekly digest: every Monday, one email listing open quotes, unpaid invoices and jobs booked for the week.
- Lead routing: enquiries from outside your service area get a courteous decline instead of sitting unanswered.
- Photo filing: job photos texted to a number get sorted into the right client folder automatically.
How the work runs
We start with a call where you walk me through what you actually do in a week, including the annoying bits you've stopped noticing. I map it, pick the one workflow with the best time-saved-to-effort ratio, and quote that. One workflow at a time, working, before we discuss the next one.
Build usually takes one to two weeks. You get it running in test mode first, on real data but with nothing sent to customers, so you can see what it would have done. When you're happy, it goes live. After that it's yours: I hand over documentation, and the Make.com scenario sits in your account, not mine.
I'm one person, so I don't build enterprise integration platforms and I won't pretend otherwise. If what you need is genuinely large, I'll tell you at the quote stage rather than three months in.
From $1,500 +GST for a single workflow.
Ongoing monitoring and changes can be folded into a monthly retainer if you'd rather not touch it yourself. Make.com and any third-party subscription costs are yours and billed at cost.
All prices AUD and exclude GST.