Five notes went up on my feed this week. Read on their own they are about different things — a consult agenda, an example page, the end of the season, a price list. Read together they are all about the same thing, and it is the part of this job nobody sells you.
Every automation has a component you have to supply yourself. Not money, and usually not time. Facts, judgment, memory, and a clear head about where one job ends and the next begins. Software has got dramatically better at the rest of it. It has not got one bit better at those four, and most projects that go wrong go wrong there rather than in the build.
The facts
There is a free ad maker on my site. It offers a standard layout like before/after, testimonial, or comparison — three formats that work, and every one of them needs something the software does not have.
Before and after needs a real before. Testimonial needs a customer who actually said it. Comparison needs a comparison you would defend out loud to somebody who disagreed. The tool will happily produce a beautiful ad with nothing true in it, and that ad will do nothing for you.
Making the thing got cheap this year. Having something true to put in it did not. If you sit down to make an ad and find you cannot, it is usually not a design problem wearing a design problem's clothes — it is that nobody has written down what is actually good about the business.
The judgment
Every automation example I publish has three lines under it: the trigger, the workflow, and your part. The third one is the one worth reading.
On the missed-call example the trigger is a call you cannot answer, the workflow is an approved text asking what is needed, and your part is to review the enquiry and call back. That last line is not a disclaimer. It is where the judgment lives — the decision about what this customer actually needs, which is the bit you are good at and the bit that carries risk.
So when somebody shows you an automation, look for the human step. If there is not one, the judgment has not been removed from the process. It has been moved somewhere nobody is looking, and you will find out where the first time it gets something wrong in front of a customer.
The memory
Around here the season has just turned over. If your summer was flat out, the next few weeks are the quiet part, and the quiet part is when people finally have time to fix things.
Here is the trap in that. The job that drove you mad in July is still broken. It is just not bothering you this week. A problem that is not bothering you does not get fixed, so it will be waiting for you in June, exactly as expensive as it was last time.
The information you need is perishable. It is most accurate in the week the problem is costing you and least available in the month you finally have time to act. So do the boring thing while you still can: write down the three jobs that cost you the most this season, in your own words. Not what you would automate — what actually went wrong, and which part of it hurt. You can fix it any time. You can only remember it now.
The joins
A flat price is easy to publish. The useful part is knowing what moves it.
Mine is on the page. One workflow, automated end to end, is $495 and goes live in about a week. Two or three workflows that talk to each other is $1,500.
What changes between those two is not how hard any single task is. It is the joins — the handoffs where one thing has to tell the next what happened, and both have to agree about it. That is where the work goes, and it is why "can we just add one small thing" is so often not small. The small thing usually arrives with a new join attached.
Which gives you something to count. Before you ask anyone for a price — me or anybody else — count the handoffs, not the tasks. Two people can describe the same project as "one job" and "four jobs" and both be right; the handoffs settle it.
And the willingness to be told no
The last one is the least comfortable. Somewhere in this process you have to be genuinely open to the answer being no.
The consult I run is free and fifteen minutes, and one of the things it does is check what your current software already does. That question ends a fair number of conversations, which is the point of asking it early rather than after an invoice. Paying for something your booking system already includes is a worse outcome than not calling me.
Put the four together and you have most of a scope: the facts that are true about your business, the step where a person still decides, the jobs that actually cost you this year, and the number of joins between them. Bring those and the build is the easy half.
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