Find out what
still runs through you.
Sixty minutes on your actual operations, then a written plan of what to automate first and why. Delivered in 3 to 5 business days.
BOOK THE BOTTLENECK AUDIT ->You already know something's wrong.
You just can't see where.
You read the intake form yourself, because nobody else knows what to do with it.
There's a follow-up you meant to send on Tuesday. It's Friday.
A client slipped last month because the handoff lived in your head and you were on a call.
You've got the pieces. Good pieces. An offer that works, clients who pay, tools you chose carefully. But you're the thing connecting them, and every new client asks for a bit more of you than the last one did.
That's not a discipline problem. It's a structure problem, and you can't see it clearly from inside it. That's what this is for.
You've probably
tried these already.
You bought the automation platform. It works, technically. But somebody still has to decide what goes where, and that somebody is you. You bought a tool where you needed a system.
Someone built one thing, it worked, and then they left. Nobody documented it. Now it's a box you don't open, and when it breaks you're back where you started.
You pay monthly and it's genuinely useful for drafting. But nothing runs on its own, because a chat window isn't a workflow. It helps you do the work faster instead of doing the work.
None of those failed because you picked wrong. They failed because the underlying process was never mapped, and you can't automate a process nobody has written down.
The Bottleneck Audit.
Sixty minutes where we go through how work actually moves through your business: what comes in, who touches it, where it waits, and what only happens because you remembered.
Then we hand you the Automation Makeover: a written plan naming the three to five things worth fixing, in the order worth fixing them, with the reason each one made the list. It's a roadmap, not a build. It tells you exactly what to do next, whether you do it yourself, hand it to someone else, or hand it back to us.
I've been building systems since 1995, and most of that has come down to finding the one piece of a process that everything else is waiting on. That's the whole skill here.
The Automation Makeover, on the page.
It's a short written plan you can hand to us, to a freelancer, or to yourself in three months. Every Makeover uses the same five-part shape. Here's one priority filled in the way yours would be, using a coaching practice as the example.
- Hours back
- About 4 a week, most of it in small interruptions rather than big blocks.
- Why this one first
- Everything downstream waits on a clean handoff. Fix intake and the follow-up problem gets smaller on its own, so doing it first makes the next two cheaper.
- Build or do it yourself
- Build. It touches your form, your calendar and your client records at once, and the routing logic is the part that breaks quietly.
- What to watch later
- Give it a look if you change your intake questions or switch form tools. Otherwise it's safe to leave alone for a year.
Your Makeover names three to five of these, in the order worth doing them, using your workflows and your tools. Nothing in it is generic advice, and nothing in it assumes you'll hire us to build it.
“I built HourHound with Claude Code, so I figured I already knew what these tools could do. Annette sent back an audit where every fix came as a prompt I could paste and run myself, including a couple of things Claude Code hadn't told me. She also caught that the most important page in every city I cover was showing Google almost nothing. Then she added a whole section on how to actually make money from what I'd built, which I never asked for. Learning to do this stuff myself was worth more than the fixes.”
Credited toward a build if you continue. Findings in 3 to 5 business days.
BOOK THE BOTTLENECK AUDIT ->What happens after
you get in touch.
How it works.
We work out whether this is worth doing at all. If a simpler fix solves your problem, we'll say so and you'll have spent nothing.
Once you book the audit you get an intake form. We review your operations before the session, so we don't spend it on background.
We go through your workflows and find the bottleneck. You'll usually know it when we hit it.
Within 3 to 5 business days, plus a recorded walkthrough. Then you decide what to do with it, with no obligation to use us.
We've been finding
bottlenecks since 1995.
I built adoption.com in 1995, before Google existed, two months after I first got online and taught myself to build database-driven sites. Then I moved to Ethiopia and built an orphanage and an international adoption program from nothing, and did it again in Kenya and Haiti.
No budget, no team, no playbook, no predecessor to copy. Those are the exact conditions most AI projects fail in. They're also the conditions I've spent my career building in anyway.
Later I built E-Teach Abroad on my own: a 120-hour course I wrote, a platform that issued its own certificates, and recruiting across seven countries against companies with actual staff. As Director of Bone Voyage Dog Rescue I built a content system that ranked for 31,310 keywords on no ad budget, and flew 4,000 rescue dogs to families.
What all of it has in common is finding the piece of a process that everything else waits on, and taking it out of the way. That's what an hour with us is for.
The questions you're
actually asking.
What if AI isn't actually the answer for my business?
Then we'll tell you that. It happens. Sometimes the fix is a clearer process, a form you already own, or dropping a step nobody needs. You'd still get the Makeover, it would just point at simpler fixes than automation. We'd rather hand you that than sell you a system you don't need.
My process is a mess. Is it too early for this?
That's usually the best time, not the worst. Automating a broken process just makes it break faster. Part of what the audit does is separate the steps worth keeping from the ones you've been carrying out of habit. You don't need to tidy up before we talk.
What happens when it breaks, or the model underneath it changes?
It will need attention eventually, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. The Makeover flags which pieces are fragile and which are safe to leave alone for a year. If you want the watching handled for you, that's the retainer. If you'd rather handle it yourself, the plan tells you what to watch.
What if my data is messy or spread across five tools?
That's the normal case, not the exception. Most small businesses have information in email, a spreadsheet, a scheduler and someone's head. Finding where it's scattered is part of the audit, because that's usually where the lost hours actually are.
Am I too small for this?
If you're one person and something repetitive eats your week, no. The whole business is built for one to ten people. What matters isn't headcount, it's whether you have a process that repeats often enough to be worth automating. We'll know that inside the 60 minutes.
Why pay for this if the first call is free?
The free 15-minute consult tells us both whether it's worth going further. It's 15 minutes and it's genuinely free. The audit is where we go through your actual operations and hand you findings you can act on with or without us. Different things, and the free one comes first.
Do I get the automations built as part of this?
No, and this is the one thing we want to be blunt about. The Bottleneck Audit produces a plan: what to fix, in what order, and why. Building it is the next rung, and your audit fee comes off the price. If you want the work done rather than mapped, skip straight to the build.
What if I don't like the plan?
You'll have had the 60 minutes and the written findings either way, and $500 is the cheapest way to find out we're not a fit. We'd rather say that plainly than pretend there's no risk in going first.
Sixty minutes to find out
what's actually in your way.
From $500, credited toward a build. Start with the free 15-minute call if you want to check the fit first.
BOOK THE BOTTLENECK AUDIT ->