More process than people to run it
The industry is not the thing these have in common. What they share is a business that grew faster than its systems, and at least one person whose week is spent holding the gap together by hand.
Companies with more process than people
Twenty to five hundred people, an operations or finance team holding the business together with spreadsheets, and a backlog of jobs everyone agrees should be automated and nobody has time to automate.
Where the hours usually go
- The monthly report pack that takes three days to assemble
- Reconciliation between the billing system and the bank
- Data re-typed between two systems that will never talk to each other
- Approvals that live in a mail thread
Engineering teams with nobody doing DevOps
Developers who are shipping, but deploying by hand, sharing credentials in chat, and finding out about outages from a customer. Not big enough to hire a platform engineer, too big to keep going like this.
Where the hours usually go
- A deployment that only one person is confident running
- Environments that have quietly drifted apart
- Backups that have never been restored
- Alerts nobody reads because there are too many
Manufacturing and distribution around the MIDC belt
Dombivli, Ambernath, Badlapur and Taloja. Production, dispatch and accounts each keeping their own register or workbook, and a day's work every month spent making the three agree.
Where the hours usually go
- Production and dispatch figures consolidated by hand
- Stock and reorder levels discovered too late
- Invoices, challans and gate passes typed twice
- Compliance records assembled the week before an audit
Agencies and services businesses
Client work is the business, and the admin around it — timesheets, status reports, invoices, renewals — eats the margin quietly.
Where the hours usually go
- The weekly client update that is assembled by hand
- Timesheets chased at month end
- Invoices raised from a spreadsheet somebody maintains
- Renewals and retainers remembered rather than tracked
Schools, colleges and coaching institutes
A front desk doing fees, attendance, marks and parent messages between batches, and an owner who finds out what happened only when somebody prepares a report.
Where the hours usually go
- Fee dues and receipts maintained by hand
- Attendance registers totalled at month end
- Marks added up and report cards typed one at a time
- The same message sent to forty parents individually
When I am the wrong person to call
- Anyone wanting one packaged product that covers everything on day one — this is built to order, one process at a time
- A process that is about to change anyway; automate it after the change, not before
- Work that needs someone on site full time, or during my working hours on weekdays
- A business that wants the automation but not the conversation about how the work actually gets done
If that sounds like your situation, you will hear it on the first call rather than after you have paid for an audit.
Not sure which one you are?
It does not matter much. The first conversation is about one job, not about your industry. Look through what I automate and see whether any of it sounds like your week.
Tell me the job you are tired of
One call, half an hour. You will get a straight answer about whether it is worth automating — including 'no' if that is the answer.