Discovery Call Booking

How the Call Runs

Thirty minutes, structured around your situation rather than a script.

The first ten minutes — what actually happens now. Walk me through the process end to end, including the parts that feel too obvious to mention. Those are usually where the automation opportunity is hiding, because they are the steps nobody thinks about any more. I will also want to know which tools you already pay for, since a surprising amount of what people want built already exists inside something they own.

The second ten minutes — what is worth doing. Which steps are genuinely automatable, which need a human and should stay that way, and where the fastest payback is. This is also where I will tell you if the answer is a settings change in your CRM rather than a build, which happens more often than you would expect.

The final ten minutes — what it involves. Rough scope for the priority piece, a realistic timeline, and the ongoing running costs. Automation is rarely a one-off spend: platforms bill monthly, AI and voice services bill per use, and anything running unattended needs occasional attention. You should know all of that before you decide anything.

What You Leave With

A short list of what to automate first and why, in priority order. A clear sense of which platform fits your case and, more usefully, which ones do not. An honest read on whether this is something you could build yourself with the tutorials on this site, and a rough scope if it is not.

Who This Is For

• Business owners losing hours a week to repetitive work
• Teams running several tools that do not talk to each other, with someone copying between them
• Anyone who has read about AI voice agents or chatbots and cannot tell what is real
• Companies weighing up hiring in-house against bringing in a specialist

What This Is Not

Not a sales call. If automation will not meaningfully help you, I will say so on the call rather than scope something anyway. If the honest recommendation is a different specialist, a piece of off-the-shelf software, or hiring someone part-time, that is what you will hear.

I will also tell you when a project is a bad idea before it is built. The most common version: automating a process that is broken to begin with, which produces the same bad outcome faster and with less visibility.

How to Prepare

You will get more out of thirty minutes with fifteen minutes of preparation.

1. Write down your three most time-consuming repetitive tasks, with a rough number of hours a week against each. The numbers do not need to be precise; an estimate is enough to rank them.
2. List the tools you use — CRM, email, calendar, accounting, scheduling, anything with a login.
3. Note where things go wrong. The step people forget, the record that gets duplicated, the enquiry that slips through. Failure points are more informative than the happy path.
4. Have a rough budget range in mind, including what you would be comfortable paying monthly rather than only the build cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to know what I want built?

No, and it is often better if you do not. Arriving with a process and a frustration works better than arriving with a specification, because a specification usually encodes an assumption about the solution that is worth testing first. Describe the problem and let the call work out the shape of the answer.

Will you tell me not to automate something?

Regularly. The usual cases: the process runs a handful of times a month and the build cost will never pay back; the process is about to change, so anything built now is wasted; or the underlying process is broken and needs fixing before it is worth speeding up. Sometimes the honest answer is that you should build it yourself — the n8n documentation is good enough that a technical founder can get a long way without me, and Make.com's pricing will tell you what the running cost would be. Saying so is more useful to both of us than quoting for it.

What if I want to build it myself?

Then you will get a straight answer about whether that is realistic and where the difficult parts are. Much of what I build is documented on this site precisely because a lot of it is buildable without me. Where people usually get stuck is error handling, duplicate prevention and the integrations with no native connector — worth knowing before you start, not after.

What happens after the call?

If there is something to build, you get a written scope with a fixed price and a timeline. If there is not, you get the recommendation and nothing else — no sequence, no follow-up campaign. The follow-up systems I build for clients are not aimed at the people who book these calls.

Before You Book

If you want a head start, the Automation Readiness Assessment and the Business Process Analyzer will help you work out where to focus, and the Automation ROI Calculator will give you a payback figure to bring to the conversation. What Is Workflow Automation is worth twenty minutes if you want the general lay of the land first.

You can see examples of finished work in the portfolio section of this site.

Book Your Slot

Book a free 30-minute call — availability stays open every week. If you would rather start with a defined piece of work instead of a conversation, I also take projects through Upwork and Fiverr.