Small business
Building an agent is no longer the hard part. For a business with one to twenty staff, the difference between a novelty and a hire is supervision: a scorecard, an owner, a halt switch, and a monthly review. This page is the playbook we use with Australian SMBs — first job, running discipline, then growth.
Four handovers cover most small businesses. Each one keeps a person on the outcome and gives the agent the drafting work.
| Role | The repeated job | What the agent does | Where you stay in control |
|---|---|---|---|
| Front door | Missed calls and after-hours enquiries | Answer, capture the job details, book or route, then text you a summary. | Every booking confirmed to you before the customer is told. |
| Quoting | Repeat quotes off a price list | Draft the quote from the enquiry and your past pricing, ready for one-tap send. | Nothing leaves without owner approval. Non-standard jobs are held. |
| Debtors | Chasing overdue invoices | Polite reminders on a schedule, escalating to you at a threshold you set. | No discounting, no payment plans, no legal language. Ever. |
| Compliance | Licences, insurances and certificates | Track expiry dates, chase the document, file it where it belongs. | Reads and requests only. It never signs or submits on your behalf. |
Running it
None of this needs a technical team. It needs a named owner and about ten minutes a day. If you cannot answer who owns an agent and how to stop it, it should not be live.
Growing it
One agent, one job
Month 1Pick the noisiest repeated job. Rehearse it against your own past work until the scorecard is boring.
Prove the number
Month 2Measure hours returned and cost per outcome at your own hourly rate. If it does not pay, fix or retire it.
Add the neighbour
Month 3Hire the agent next door to the first — quoting after front door, scheduling after quoting — so context is shared.
Promote by version
OngoingCorrections compile into a new approved version with a scheduled cutover, re-run against the permanent eval set.
One. The trigger is repetition, not headcount. If the same job happens more than a few times a week from a template or a price list, an agent can carry the first draft of it while a person still approves the outcome.
The job that interrupts you most and has the lowest cost of being wrong — usually missed calls, repeat quoting, or invoice chasing. Leave anything involving legal commitments, pricing exceptions or dispute handling with a person.
A fixed-price Work Audit is AUD 490 excl GST, and done-with-you build sessions start at AUD 450 excl GST. Voice and SMS usage from providers like Twilio is metered and passed through at cost. Self-serve monthly plans are in early access.
The pattern we see is that the repeated keyboard work goes first, and the people stay on the work that needs a human — judgement calls, relationships, and the messy jobs. We do not monitor or score your staff, by design.
The Work Audit maps every repeated task in your business, costs it at the hourly rates you give us, and hands you a ranked build plan you keep either way. AUD 490 excl GST, credited in full against a build session within 60 days.
