Workings Back to the site

The workings

Six jobs, taken apart.

Everything here comes out of my own business — a shop, a warehouse and a website — written up with the numbers intact and the supplier names taken out. Four are jobs I automated, one is a set of jobs I couldn't, and one is what I charge and why. No theory, no predictions about the future of work.

REF / 01 · PURCHASING The weekly reorder that used to take six hours Sales velocity, seasonality and stock across two locations, worked out by hand every week. What replaced it, and the three decisions the software still isn't allowed to make. Read it → REF / 02 · DEAD STOCK Not everything that isn't selling is dead in the same way Scoring slow stock by how dead it actually is, with a cost floor under every discount. Why the exclusion list matters six times more than the model does. Read it → REF / 03 · EMAIL The email nobody writes outperforms the one you agonise over The automated welcome sequence pulls 2.8× the clicks of an ordinary campaign, per email. Why the gap is timing rather than cleverness, and what rebuilding it was actually worth. Read it → REF / 04 · THE FEE What £1,200 actually buys, and what it doesn't The audit written out in full: the sequence, the four things it explicitly isn't, and the four cases where I'd tell you to keep your money. Read it → REF / 05 · THE LIMITS Five things I tried to automate, and stopped The failures, which are more useful than the wins. All five are still unresolved, and the pattern in them is the best guide I have to what's worth building. Read it → REF / 06 · ONBOARDING A supplier's email in. Live, priced, pictured products out. One run drawn end to end, with the purchasing and the marketing falling out of the same pass. The diagram version, if you'd rather see the shape than read the numbers. Read it →
A narrow stockroom aisle receding between two runs of shelving into soft daylight.

Why these, and why no blog

There's no news section here and there won't be. I'm not going to tell you what AI means for your industry, because I don't know, and neither does anyone writing that headline this week.

What I can do is show you a job I actually took apart, with the hours before and after, and let you work out whether the same shape exists in your business. That's a slower kind of writing and there'll never be much of it. Six pieces is close to everything I know that's worth publishing.

Where a number can't be checked, the page says so in the body rather than in the small print. There are two of those, and both are flagged where they appear.

If one of them looks like your Tuesday, the calculator on the front page will put a number on it in about three minutes, and it'll show you the total without asking for an email address.

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