AI opportunity assessment for UK small businesses
Find the first AI opportunity worth implementing
A practical review of how your business handles enquiries, admin, customers, documents and decisions, with recommendations ranked by value, effort and risk. You leave with a plan you could hand to somebody else.
£99 founding priceplus VAT. Limited places while we build our first case studies.
Manchester based, UK wide. The report is yours to keep, with us or without us.
Everyone tells you to use AI. Nobody tells you where to start
The advice available to a small business owner about AI is close to useless. It is either enormous and abstract, written for companies with a transformation budget, or it is a list of tools with no explanation of which one solves a problem you actually have.
- You have tried a few tools and none of them stuck, because nothing connected to how you actually work.
- Every article assumes you have time to experiment. You have a business to run.
- The people selling you AI cannot tell you what it will save, only what it can do.
- You suspect there is something worth doing here, and you have no idea what it is.
- Meanwhile the admin keeps eating the evenings.
The problem is almost never the technology. It is that nobody has looked at your specific week and told you which part of it is worth changing first.
What this actually is
A structured look at how your business runs, followed by a written plan. Deliberately narrow, deliberately practical, and priced so it is an easy decision rather than a project.
We spend forty-five minutes going through your actual week. Not your org chart or your ambitions, the week: how work reaches you, what happens to it, who does the repetitive parts, where things wait, and what you personally end up doing at seven in the evening that somebody or something else could do.
Then we go away and do the analysis properly rather than reacting on the call. We look at where the time is going, which of those places has a realistic technical answer, what each change would take to implement, and what could go wrong with it. Some of what we find will not be an AI problem at all, and we say so.
You get a written report ranking the opportunities, a recommendation for what to do first, indicative costs, and a call to walk through it. If you never speak to us again, the report still works, because it is written to be handed to whoever you like.
Why it is not free
Free audits are usually sales calls in a costume, and both sides know it. Charging a small amount changes the nature of the conversation: you get a real piece of work, and we are not obliged to find a problem that we happen to sell the solution to.
It also filters sensibly. Somebody willing to spend £99 finding out is somebody serious about doing something with the answer.
Why it is only £99 at the moment
Because we are early, and we are being straight about that. We are building our first set of case studies with businesses outside our own walls, and the founding price reflects what our evidence currently supports rather than what the work is worth.
When we have measured results from real clients to point at, this will cost more. We would rather tell you that plainly than run a permanent discount off an invented original price, which is a tactic that fools nobody and quietly damages trust.
What we will not claim
You will find plenty of AI companies quoting an average number of hours saved. We are not going to, because we do not yet have the measured client evidence to stand it up, and quoting somebody else's survey as though it were our result would be dishonest.
Where the assessment estimates a time, cost or revenue impact, it is clearly labelled as an estimate and it is based on figures you supply. You will be able to see the arithmetic and disagree with it.
How the assessment runs
About a fortnight from booking to report, and roughly ninety minutes of your time in total.
- 01
A short brief
A few questions before we meet, so the call is spent on your business rather than on establishing what you do.
- 02
The 45-minute review
We walk through a normal week. Where work comes from, what happens to it, what waits, what gets repeated, what you do in the evenings.
- 03
Analysis
We map the process, identify the bottlenecks, and work out which have a realistic answer and what each would cost to implement.
- 04
The report
Five prioritised opportunities, an impact against effort matrix, the recommended first project, and indicative costs.
- 05
The 30-minute review call
We walk you through it, argue about it if you like, and agree what you would do first. No obligation attached.
What is in the report
Written to be usable by somebody who was not on the call.
A summary of your current bottlenecks
Where time and opportunities are actually going, described in your language rather than in process-improvement jargon.
Five prioritised opportunities
Specific changes, not categories. What to change, roughly what it involves, and what it would plausibly be worth.
An impact against effort matrix
The quick wins, the bigger projects, and the things that look appealing and are not worth doing yet.
The recommended first project
One thing, chosen because it is the best combination of value, low risk and speed. Starting with five things is how these efforts die.
Indicative implementation costs
Honest ranges for each recommendation, including where the answer is a tool you buy yourself rather than anything from us.
Practical next steps
What to do on Monday, in an order that makes sense, whether or not we are the ones doing it.
Why we can say this with a straight face
We ran this on ourselves before we sold it to anybody
Everything in this assessment is the process we used on Manchester PC, and the reason we trust it is that it produced uncomfortable answers about our own business rather than flattering ones.
When we did it, we expected the answer to be something technical. It was not. The biggest single opportunity was that we were not answering the phone, and the second was that we never followed up a quote. Neither of those is an exciting AI project. Both were costing us considerably more than anything clever we could have built.
That is why the assessment ranks by value rather than by how interesting the technology is. Left to our own instincts we would have built the sophisticated thing first, because it is more fun, and we would have carried on losing the same work.
It also produced a list of things not to do, which turned out to be as useful. A couple of ideas we were keen on came out badly on the effort side and we shelved them. One we built anyway, watched, and switched off again a few weeks later. That experience is why the report has a section for what to leave alone.
Our own assessment told us the answer was answering the phone. It was the least exciting finding possible and it was worth more than everything else on the list.
Read the whole storyWhat we look at during the review
Five areas, in this order. Most of the value comes out of the first two, which surprises people who were expecting a conversation about technology.
How work reaches you
Every route by which somebody can become a customer, including the ones nobody counts: the personal mobile, the social media message, the enquiry that comes through a friend. Businesses are routinely wrong about the split, and the wrong assumption sends investment to the wrong place.
We also ask what happens to each route when everybody is busy, because the honest answer usually identifies the biggest single opportunity within about ten minutes.
What happens between enquiry and job
The handovers, the waiting, the decisions and the places where something sits until a person notices it. This is where most small businesses lose money, and it is almost invisible from the inside because everybody is busy while it happens.
We are looking for the gaps rather than the work. The work is usually fine.
The repetitive admin
What gets typed twice. What gets copied between systems. What somebody has to remember to do. What happens in the evening because it did not fit in the day.
Multiply frequency by duration and this list turns into hours very quickly, usually more than the owner expects.
The systems you already pay for
A great deal of what businesses want is already sitting unused inside software they own. Accounting packages, Microsoft 365, the CRM somebody bought two years ago and abandoned.
It would be embarrassing to sell you something you already have, so we check this before recommending anything new.
Where a decision actually needs a person
The final pass is about boundaries. Which parts of your process involve judgement, taste or liability, and therefore should stay with a human whatever the technology can do.
That list matters as much as the automation list. It is what stops an implementation embarrassing you in front of a customer.
One price, one thing
Plus VAT. Limited places at this price while we build our first external case studies.
AI Opportunity Assessment
£99
Any small business that suspects there is something worth doing and does not know what
- 45-minute business workflow review
- Summary of your current bottlenecks
- Five prioritised opportunities
- Impact against effort matrix
- Recommended first project
- Indicative implementation costs
- Practical next steps you can act on
- 30-minute report review call
Not sure whether you need this or the Lead Leak Assessment? That one is narrower and answers a single question: what are you losing at the point of enquiry. This one looks across the whole business.
Who this suits, and who it does not
It is a cheap enough decision that it rarely needs much thought, but we would rather you spent the money well.
It suits you if the admin is the constraint
If you are turning work away or working evenings because of the volume of routine handling around the actual job, there is almost certainly something here. That is the most common shape of business we help.
It also suits you if you have already bought a few AI tools and none of them stuck. That is usually a symptom of picking tools before picking a problem.
It suits you if you are about to spend money
If you are considering a CRM, a new website or an automation project, ninety-nine pounds to establish whether it is the right first move is cheap insurance. We have talked people out of larger purchases at this stage, which is not commercially clever in the short term and is the reason we sleep well.
It does not suit a business with one obvious problem
If you already know exactly what is wrong, do not pay us to tell you. Go straight to the thing. If you are missing calls, the receptionist page is the conversation. If quotes go cold, it is the lead management page.
We will point you there on the phone rather than selling you an assessment you do not need.
It does not suit somebody looking for validation
If you have already decided what to build and want a document that agrees, this will be uncomfortable. The assessment will say what our analysis says, including when that is that your idea is not the best use of the money.
Frequently asked questions
What do you need from me?
Forty-five minutes for the review, thirty for the walkthrough, and honest answers in between. It helps if you can say roughly how many enquiries you get and what an average job is worth, but we can work with estimates.
Do I have to buy anything afterwards?
No, and a fair number of people do not. The report is written so it works on its own, including recommendations that involve tools you would buy yourself rather than anything from us.
Is this the same as a free consultation?
No. A free consultation is a conversation. This is a piece of analysis with a written deliverable, and the difference is that we spend time on it after the call rather than trying to close you during it.
How is it different from the Lead Leak Assessment?
The Lead Leak Assessment measures one thing precisely: what you are losing at the point of enquiry, using a real week of your calls and forms. This is broader and looks across admin, customers, documents and decisions as well.
Will the recommendations be things only you can build?
Not necessarily, and we would be suspicious of an assessment that always concluded that. Plenty of recommendations are configuration changes, existing software you already pay for, or process changes that cost nothing.
How long until I get the report?
Usually about a week after the review call, then we book the walkthrough at a time that suits you. We would rather take a few days and think properly than hand you something generated on the call.
Will the price go up?
Yes, once we have measured client results to point at. The founding price reflects the fact that our evidence is currently our own business rather than a portfolio of case studies. Anyone who books at £99 keeps that price for the assessment they booked.
Do I need to prepare anything?
No, and please do not build a document for us. The most useful version of this call is you describing a normal week honestly, including the parts that are messy. Businesses that prepare a polished account of how things are supposed to work make the assessment less accurate, because the value is in the gap between the official process and the real one.
Can my team be on the call?
Yes, and it usually improves it. The person who answers the phone and the person who does the invoicing know things the owner does not, and they are often the ones who can say precisely where the time goes. We would rather have three people for forty-five minutes than one person for two hours.
What if we are in a sector you have not worked in?
That is normal and it matters less than you would think. The shapes are consistent across service businesses: work arrives, it gets qualified, quoted, delivered and invoiced. The vocabulary changes and the bottlenecks tend not to. Where a sector has genuine regulatory constraints we will say plainly that you need specialist advice on that part rather than pretending otherwise.
Is any of this confidential?
Yes. What you tell us stays with us, and anything we might later want to use as an anonymised example gets your permission first. We are building case studies, and we are not going to build them out of things people told us in confidence without asking.
The patterns we see again and again
Every business is different and almost every assessment finds the same handful of shapes underneath. Recognising yours here does not make the assessment pointless, because the value is in the specifics and the ordering, but it may save you some time.
The first pattern is the business that is excellent at the work and poor at the moments around it. The jobs are done properly, the customers are happy once they are customers, and enquiries evaporate before they ever become customers. This is by far the most common, and it is the one where the fix is cheapest relative to what it returns.
The second is the business drowning in a specific piece of admin that has grown quietly. Usually invoices, stock or scheduling. It started as fifteen minutes and is now most of a day a week, and because it grew gradually nobody noticed the point at which it became worth solving.
The third is the business that has bought several tools and joined none of them up. Each one works. Together they create a job that did not exist before, which is somebody typing the same information into all of them. Often the answer here is not another purchase but connecting what is already there.
The fourth, and the one we most enjoy delivering, is the business that does not need any of this yet. Sometimes the honest answer is that the volume does not justify it and the money is better spent on getting more enquiries in the first place. That is a perfectly good outcome for ninety-nine pounds.
If you read those four and one of them is obviously you, tell us on the call. It shortens the conversation and gets us to the specifics faster.
Where the recommendations usually lead
These are the services the assessment most often points at. It will not always point at ours.
- Lead capture and follow-upThe most common first recommendation, because it is where money leaks quietest.
- AI receptionistFor businesses where the phone is the main way work arrives and nobody can answer it.
- Business automationWhere the constraint is repetitive admin rather than lost enquiries.
- Quote and job managementWhere the work is won but the delivery is disorganised.
- Connected websitesWhen the honest answer is that not enough people are finding you.
- Lead Leak AssessmentThe narrower £99 alternative, measuring one real week of enquiries.
Ninety-nine pounds to stop guessing
One call, one piece of analysis, one written plan that is yours to keep. If the honest finding is that you should not spend money on any of this yet, that is what the report will say.
Plus VAT. Founding price, limited places while we build our first case studies.