AI & automation · 5–20 staff · £1m–£3m turnover
The most expensive person in your business is the one doing it by hand.
I run a retail and e-commerce business in South Wales. Over the last two years I handed the repetitive half of it to software — purchasing, stock, pricing, reporting, marketing. Same headcount. Considerably less faff. Now I do the same for other owner-managed firms growing faster than their admin can cope with.
| Account | Hrs / week | Cost / year |
|---|---|---|
| Re-typing data between systems7.0 hrs/wk | 7.0 | £7,084 |
| Building quotes and purchase orders5.5 hrs/wk | 5.5 | £5,566 |
| Answering the same twenty questions6.0 hrs/wk | 6.0 | £6,072 |
| Stock counts and reconciliation4.5 hrs/wk | 4.5 | £4,554 |
| Pulling numbers into a report nobody reads3.0 hrs/wk | 3.0 | £3,036 |
| Total, sat in the wrong column26.0 hrs/wk | 26.0 | £26,312 |
Receipts, not case studies
Everything I sell, I built for myself first.
These are from my own business. I'll walk you through any of them, warts included, on a call.
6 hrs → 20 min
Weekly supplier reorder. Sales velocity, seasonality and stock-by-location worked out automatically. The buyer reviews and sends.
986 lines
Slow stock scored by how dead it actually was, priced by tier with a cost floor, and written straight to the website. Two days of work, done in an afternoon.
2.5×
Click rate on the rebuilt welcome sequence, after segmenting on actual buying behaviour rather than "everyone who ever handed over an email address".
Free · no call · 3 minutes
Work out what your admin is actually costing you.
Eight questions. Best estimates are fine — you know your business better than any benchmark does. You'll get a number and the three jobs worth fixing first.
Estimated annual cost of manual admin
£0
Realistically recoverable in year one £0
Worth fixing first
How I got there
Fixed prices · no day rates · no lock-in
Start small. Prove it pays. Then do more.
Nothing here obliges you to do the next step. Stopping after the audit is a perfectly respectable outcome.
The look
Free · 45 minutes
- A call, on video, with me
- You show me how the work actually flows
- I tell you the two or three things I'd change
- If there's nothing worth doing, I'll say so
The audit
£1,200 + VAT · 2 weeks
- Half a day on site, watching the real thing
- Every repetitive job costed and ranked
- A build plan with prices against each item
- One quick win built and live before I leave
- Fee comes off the first build if you go ahead
The build
From £3,500 + VAT · 3–4 weeks
- One job, properly automated, in production
- Built on tools you already pay for where possible
- Your team trained on it, in plain English
- Written down so you're not hostage to me
- Ongoing support from £750/month if wanted
Prices are per project, not per day. Nothing starts without a written scope you've agreed.
Who you'd actually be dealing with
I've met a payroll. Most people selling you AI haven't.
I'm Graham. I started a retail business in 2020, opened a shop in 2023, and now run a team across a shop and a warehouse. I've done the VAT return at eleven at night. I've had the cashflow week where you move money around and hope. I know what it's like when the thing that's supposed to save you time takes six months and a consultant to install.
So I work the other way round. Small pieces, fast, on tools you're already paying for. Nothing that needs a change programme. Nothing that leaves you unable to run your own business without me. If the honest answer is "hire someone" or "just use a spreadsheet", that's what I'll tell you — I'd rather lose the sale than sell you a machine you don't need.
And I'm still running the day job, which means two things. One: everything I recommend is something I'm living with myself. Two: I take on three clients at a time, so if I'm full I'll say so and tell you when I'm not.
- Based
- Barry, South Wales
- Works with
- UK firms, 5–20 staff
- Best fit
- Retail, e-commerce, distribution, trade & wholesale
- Tools I lean on
- Shopify, Xero, Klaviyo, Google Workspace, Cloudflare, Claude
- Capacity
- 3 active clients
- Will not do
- Six-month discovery phases. Anything a spreadsheet already does well.
The awkward questions
Asked before you have to ask them.
Is this going to cost me staff?
Usually not, and I'd be wary of anyone promising it will. In a business your size the bottleneck isn't headcount, it's that your good people lose a chunk of every week to work a machine should be doing. The gain shows up as more done with the people you've got — which is what you need if you're growing and can't afford the next hire yet.
We've been burned by an agency before.
Most people have. That's why the audit is fixed-price and comes off the build, why there's no retainer until something is live and working, and why everything gets documented so you can take it in-house or to someone else. If I disappeared tomorrow your business would still run.
Our data is a mess. Aren't we too early for this?
Everyone's data is a mess. Mine was. You don't need a data warehouse to stop someone re-typing invoices into a spreadsheet. I start with the jobs that don't depend on clean data, and the data tends to tidy itself up as a side effect of automating the thing that kept breaking it.
Cashflow is tight. That's the whole problem.
Understood — it's why the first step is free and the second is £1,200 rather than a five-figure engagement. I'd rather find you one thing that pays for itself inside a quarter than sell you a programme. If the audit turns up nothing worth building, I'll tell you that on the day rather than write it up nicely and invoice you anyway.
Do you actually build it, or just write a report?
I build it. The audit includes something working before I leave, so you can see the difference between a slide deck and a thing that runs on Tuesday morning without anyone touching it.
What if we're in the same trade as you?
Then I'll turn you down. I won't take on a business that competes with mine, and I don't reuse one client's numbers or systems on another's account. Say so early and neither of us wastes an hour.
You already know which job it is. Find out what it costs.
Three minutes, no call, no email needed to see your number.
Run the audit