Before the call #
There is no preparation you have to do, and a call with no preparation is still a useful one. Three things make it better.
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Have the person who does the admin on the call
This is the single largest difference between a good session and a vague one. Owners describe the process as it was designed. The person doing it describes the nine exceptions, which is where the hours are.
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Know roughly what your systems are
Not versions or logins, just the names: what you invoice from, where customer records live, which inbox things arrive in.
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Bring a number if you have one
If you have already been through the cost of admin time calculator or the which tasks run on rules tool, the answer it gave is a good place to start the conversation.
You do not need to know what you want automated. Arriving with a firm idea is fine too, and part of the call will be checking whether it is the thing actually costing you the most.
The call itself #
It is a conversation about a normal week, not a demonstration. You do most of the talking. The questions are the same ordinary ones each time: what gets repeated, who does it, how often, how long it takes, what happens when it goes wrong, and which parts get dropped when you are busy.
Expect to be asked about the awkward bits. The job nobody wants to own. The thing that only goes wrong in January. The customer who insists on doing it differently. Those are not interruptions to the conversation, they are most of the value in it, because they are what decides whether a job is straightforward or a project.
What you get, and keep #
Afterwards you get a written summary. It contains:
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A list of the repeated jobs in your business
As you described them, in your own words rather than ours.
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The hours each one currently takes
From your figures. This is a count of time spent now, not a projection of time saved, for the reasons set out on how we work out the numbers.
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A shortlist of the ones worth acting on first
With what each would depend on and what would make it harder than it looks.
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The ones we would leave alone, and why
This part is usually longer than people expect.
It is yours. There is nothing to sign, no account to create and no part of it held back. If you take it to another supplier, that is a reasonable thing to do with it, and it will make their quote better as well as more comparable.
What we do with what you tell us #
We hold what you send through the form, which is your name and email address so we can reply, plus anything else you choose to give us. It is stored in our own systems, a copy reaches us by email, and we use it to answer you and to carry out the audit.
We do not sell anything to anyone, we do not use what you tell us to train a public AI model, and one email makes us delete it. All of that is set out in full, including who processes it on our behalf and how long we keep it, on our privacy notice.
On the call itself, please do not send us client files or personal records. We do not need them to do this, and you should not be handing anybody personal data before there is an agreement in place, for reasons covered in what a data processing agreement is for. Describing the shape of the work is enough.
What does not happen #
- No obligation, and no sequence of chasing emails. If we do not hear from you, that is an answer and we take it as one.
- No price on the call. Quoting before anyone has understood the job is how projects get repriced halfway through. What the cost is made of is explained in how much AI automation costs.
- No pretence that everything is automatable. A fair share of audits end with us saying the honest answer is a spreadsheet, a setting nobody turned on, or a connection between two systems you already pay for. The patterns are in when not to automate something.
- No method walkthrough. How we would build something is what the paid work is. What we will tell you for free is what is worth building and what is not.
When it is not worth booking #
Two cases, said plainly. If the repeated work in your business amounts to a couple of hours a week, there is no automation project at any price that repays itself, and a call will not change that. And if you already know exactly what you want built and are shopping on price alone, you want quotes rather than an audit.
Everyone else tends to get something out of it, including the people who conclude they should do nothing. Knowing which of your jobs are worth the attention is the whole exercise, and the test behind it is in which jobs are worth automating.
Before you speak to anyone, including us #
It is worth reading questions to ask an AI supplier first. We published it knowing it would be used on us, and a client who arrives with those questions gets a better conversation than one who does not.