We automate the work that shouldn’t need a human.

Half the fee is held until the system is live and doing what the scope said, so the risk of an unfinished build sits with us, not you. The scope and the price are both written down before anything starts. And if you want to test us on something smaller first, the £499 audit is designed for exactly that and is credited in full against a build.

You do not run it. After the first session (one hour, with whoever knows how the work actually happens) the build phase asks nothing of your team. We work in your tools rather than in your diary, and the next time you hear from us there is something to look at. The Miners Arms build was live in 11 days, and their operations manager was running two venues throughout.

Every figure on this site traces to one of four published engagements, and each of those clients agreed in writing to be published. Three are named; the fourth is a sole trader, so it is described rather than named, because naming the business would name the person. The case studies show what was broken before, what was built, and the measured result, including the one that is not a UK business, which is labelled as such. Any number we cannot source, we do not publish.

That doesn't necessarily tell us that AI didn't work for you. It may tell us that the previous purchase wasn't well matched to the problem.

A lot of AI tools are bought because the technology looks impressive, rather than because there's a clearly defined business process with a measurable outcome behind it.

Before we recommend anything, we'd want to understand what you actually tried, what you expected it to do, where it fell short, and what the underlying workflow looked like.

If the problem is that the process isn't suitable for AI, we'll tell you.

If the problem was that the previous tool wasn't connected to the right systems, didn't have the right context, or wasn't designed around the actual workflow, that's a different problem.

So we wouldn't ask you to try AI again. We'd first work out whether there's a specific job where automation can produce a worthwhile result, and if there isn't, we won't force one.

That is the reason to build rather than to buy. Off-the-shelf tools fail on specific processes because they are designed for the average of a market; a bespoke build starts from how your business actually works, including the parts that only make sense to you. Specific is not the obstacle; undocumented is, and the first session exists to fix that.

Quite possibly.

If what you need is a handful of straightforward automations, and you have someone internally who enjoys building and maintaining them, ChatGPT and Zapier may be all you need. We'll say that openly on the call.

Where we tend to get involved is when the requirement moves beyond connecting a few apps. The real work becomes deciding what should be automated, handling exceptions, making the workflow reliable, connecting the right systems and credentials, and maintaining it when the business changes.

So the question isn't really whether this can be built with ChatGPT and Zapier. In many cases, yes.

The question is whether you want to spend your own time building, testing, monitoring and maintaining it — or whether having us own that problem is worth more than the cost of doing it yourself.

There are definitely situations where we would tell you not to automate something. For example:

1. The process is still changing. If nobody has agreed on how the work should actually be done, automating it just makes an unstable process harder to change.
2. The volume is too low. If something takes ten minutes a month, building and maintaining automation may cost more than simply doing it manually.
3. The decision genuinely needs human judgement. If the value comes from context, relationships, negotiation or nuanced judgement, automation may remove more value than it creates.
4. The economics don't work. If the potential saving or improvement isn't meaningful enough to justify the implementation and ongoing maintenance, we won't recommend it.

Our job isn't to find something to automate just because we can. It's to work out whether automation actually makes economic and operational sense.

Sometimes the right answer is: leave it alone.

Everything runs on Trigger.dev and n8n in your own accounts, not on infrastructure only we can see. Failures retry and then alert rather than dropping work silently, you get the documentation and the credentials, and any competent automation developer can pick it up. Support runs for 30 to 90 days depending on the build, with an optional care plan after that.

That's something we'd want to be very clear about before anything is connected.

The starting point is that your systems remain your systems. We don't take ownership of your accounts or credentials.

Where an automation needs access to a system, it uses the relevant account and permissions required to perform that particular job. We don't need your passwords sitting in a Crownbot database just so an automation can run.

The same principle applies to the AI or other services involved in a workflow: we need to understand what information is being passed to them, why it is being passed, and what account or connection is being used.

Access should be limited to what the workflow actually needs, rather than giving a system unrestricted access to everything.

We'll also be transparent about the architecture of the particular automation we're proposing — which systems it connects to, what data moves between them, which accounts are used, and where credentials are held.

If the architecture doesn't make sense to you, we don't expect you to approve it.

The important point is that we're not asking you to hand over your business data and trust us with a black box. The setup should be understandable: your accounts, your permissions, the specific connections required, and a clear path for the data through the workflow.

It has not in any build we have delivered. What it removes is the part of the day nobody was hired to do: copying bookings between systems, answering the same three questions, chasing an invoice for the fourth time. Our hospitality client reclaimed 624 hours a year and kept the same team; the manager just stopped spending twelve hours a week reconciling by hand.