Most of what you could automate is not worth automating
A few days inside your actual operations, ending in a ranked shortlist of the processes that pay back. Costs attached to each one. Plus the list of things we tell you to leave alone, which is usually longer.
In short: We spend a few days with the people who do the work, score every candidate process against four criteria, and hand you a written report. What to automate first, what it costs to build and to run, and what to leave alone. The report is yours. Take it to another firm if you want to.
Four questions decide whether a process is worth automating
Most automation projects fail long before anyone writes code. They fail at selection. A team picks the process that irritates them most, or the one a vendor demoed well on a Tuesday, and neither of those is the same as the one that pays back. So we score candidates on four things and ignore everything else, including how impressive the finished system would look.
How often it actually happens
Twice a year is a bad candidate no matter how much it hurts. Forty times a day is worth a look even when each instance is small. Frequency multiplies everything else, so we count it from records rather than memory: ticket logs, inbox volume, calendar entries, whatever trace the work leaves behind.
Real time per instance
Not the time someone estimates in a meeting. The time it takes including the interruption around it: the context switch in, the hunt for the right file, the switch back out and the minutes lost getting back to what they were doing. A four-minute task that breaks concentration twice an hour costs far more than four minutes.
What a wrong output costs
A misfiled receipt gets corrected on Tuesday. A wrong price sent to a customer does not get corrected at all. Processes where errors are cheap and visible automate well. Where an error is expensive and quiet, you need review in the loop, and that review time comes straight off the saving.
Whether the data and the rules exist
If nobody can state the rule, no system can apply it. We check two things: are the inputs already captured somewhere a machine can read, and is the decision written down or does it live in one person’s head. This is the criterion that most often turns a promising idea into a later one.
The four scores are not averaged into a single number. Averaging hides the thing you need to see. A process can score well on three and still be undoable because the fourth is a zero, and a report that buries that under a weighted total is doing you harm. We show the four separately and write a sentence about which one is doing the work.
The no-list is the part clients remember
Every audit produces two lists. The shortlist gets the attention. The other one is longer, and it is the reason the audit is worth paying for, because a written no is what stops a budget going into something that was never going to work.
Processes land there for boring reasons. The volume is too low to repay any build. The judgment involved is the job, not an obstacle to it. Errors are expensive enough that a person has to check every output, so the automation saves keystrokes and nothing else. Or the upstream data is such a mess that cleaning it up is the real project, and it should be scoped and funded as one instead of hiding inside an AI initiative where it will be under-resourced.
And sometimes the honest finding is that a process should be deleted. A report that four people read and none of them act on. A reconciliation step that exists because two systems disagreed in 2019. That shows up more often than you would expect, and it is free to fix.
You get a report, not a deck
A deck is built to be presented. It flatters the room, compresses the reasoning into three bullets, and stops making sense the moment the person who presented it leaves. Two weeks later nobody can reconstruct why option B was ruled out.
The report is written to be read alone, by someone who was not in any of the meetings. For each recommended process it states what triggers the work, how often it runs, what it costs today in hours and money, what the automated version would look like in practice, what building it would cost and what running it would cost every month after that, what a bad output looks like and who would catch it, and what has to be true before anyone starts. Where a number depends on an assumption, the assumption is written next to it so you can change it and watch the answer move.
It is your document. No watermark, no dependency, nothing in the contract that stops you sending it to three other agencies for quotes. If someone else builds the first project cheaper than we would, the audit did its job.
How the days are spent
The first part is listening, and it happens with the people who do the work rather than only the people who describe it. Managers give you the intended process. The person in the queue gives you the real one, including the spreadsheet they keep on the side because the official system cannot handle a common case. That side spreadsheet is usually the most useful thing we find all week.
Then we go to the records to check the story. Volumes, timestamps, how long things sit, how often work comes back for rework. Interviews are good at what happens and bad at how often, so we do not take a frequency estimate on trust when a system log can settle it.
Scoring, drafting, and then an argument. We walk the draft through with you before it is final, specifically to be contradicted. If someone in the room knows why the top-ranked item cannot happen until the ERP migration finishes, we would rather hear it then.
What we won’t do
Run an audit without access to the people doing the work
Sometimes access is off the table, because a reorganization is in flight or leadership wants the review kept quiet. We decline those. A description of a process and the process itself differ almost every time, and an audit built on the description is a confident document about a company that does not exist.
Tilt the shortlist toward work we would like to sell you
The audit fee does not depend on you hiring us for the build, and the ranking does not get bent toward the things our team happens to enjoy. If the top recommendation is a change to a form, a policy decision and a spreadsheet formula, that is what the report says, and we will have talked ourselves out of a project.
Compress it into a half-day workshop
We get asked for the fast version: a room, a whiteboard, a shortlist by the afternoon. We say no. Anything produced that quickly is a list of guesses with our name on it, and you already have guesses for free. The value is in the counting, and the counting takes days.
What our clients say
The businesses we’ve built for, in their own words.
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Owner, Richland Properties
Real Estate
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★★★★★
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Isabella Scott
Which three processes are actually worth it?
Tell us roughly what your team spends its days on. We will tell you whether an audit is likely to find anything worth building before you pay for one.
A few days of our time, usually spread across a week or two so we can work around your team’s calendars. The variable is access rather than effort: if the people who run the processes are hard to book, it stretches. We agree the schedule before we start and we do not bill for the waiting.
Do we need our data cleaned up first?
No. How usable your data is happens to be one of the four things we score, so assessing it is part of the work rather than a prerequisite for it. If the answer for a given process is that the data would need months of cleanup first, that is a finding. It usually moves the process down the list rather than off it, and it turns the cleanup into a project you can budget for on its own.
What if the audit says we should not automate anything?
Then that is what the report says. It happens with small teams whose volumes are genuinely too low, and with companies whose real constraint is pricing or hiring rather than throughput. We would rather tell you in the first week than take a build budget for a system that saves four hours a month and needs someone to babysit it.
Can we use the report to get quotes from other agencies?
Yes, and some clients do exactly that. The report is written so a third party can price the work without speaking to us, because triggers, volumes, inputs, failure modes and constraints are all spelled out. Nothing in our terms prevents it. If someone builds it better or cheaper, you still got what you paid for.
