By role: COOs and heads of operations
AI automation for COOs who own how the business runs.
You are measured on throughput, cost and the things that did not go wrong. We find where the hours go, fix the worst of it at a fixed price, and hand you something you can govern.
- First workflow live
- Operations audit, usually inside the first sprint
- Usually owned by
- COOs and chief operating officers
- Built on
- n8n, Make, Airtable
- Judged on
- Hours lost to manual work and Cycle time
In short
AI automation for a COO starts with a measured audit of where operational hours are lost, ranked by cost, then fixed-price builds that remove re-typing, chasing and manual reporting. Each workflow gets a named owner, monitoring and a review queue for exceptions. SBD runs the audit for $500, credited to the first build.
Who this is for
Who you work with to get this done.
- COOs and chief operating officers
- Heads of operations and operations directors
- General managers who run the day to day
- Founders who have just hired their first COO
Is this you?
If three of these sound like your week, this page is about your week.
- Your diary is mostly status meetings
- The weekly numbers take someone a day to compile
- You do not have a list of every automation running
- One person leaving would stop a process
- A pilot worked, then quietly stopped
What it costs today
Where COOs and heads of operations loses the hours.
Your week goes on chasing, not deciding
Status meetings, follow-up messages and "where is this" calls fill the time you meant to spend on capacity, cost and the next quarter.
Every team has bought its own tool
Sales, finance and the floor each run a different system, and the joins between them are people with spreadsheets.
Automation pilots that nobody owns
Someone built a Zap or tried an AI tool. It worked for a month, then stopped quietly, and nobody noticed until a customer did.
You cannot see the operation live
The numbers you run the business on are compiled by hand each week, so you manage last week, not today.
For COOs
A ranked list of where your hours go, with a price on each fix.
Two weeks with your team, then a report you can take to the board. The $500 is credited to whatever you build first.
Book the operations audit
By company size
COOs and heads of operations at 10 people, and at 1,000.
- 11 to 50
You are the operations team, and most of your week is answering questions a system should answer.
- 51 to 200
Each department has its own tool, and you are the integration layer between them.
- 201 to 1,000
Several sites and systems, a weekly pack that takes a day to build, and automations nobody has a list of.
What we build
What we build for COOs and heads of operations teams.
- 01
An audit ranked by hours and cost
We sit with the people doing the work, measure where time is lost, and give you each finding with a fixed price to fix. A list you can take to the board.
- 02
One record through the operation
Order, job or ticket carried from intake to invoice as one record, so status is a fact in a system, not a question for a person.
- 03
A live operations view
Work by stage, what is late, what is at risk and who owns it, read from the systems that did the work rather than a weekly export.
- 04
Governance you can stand behind
A named owner per workflow, alerts when something fails, a review queue for exceptions, and a register of every automation running in your name.
The workflows
The COOs and heads of operations workflows, and what sets each one off.
- 01 Operations audit
When engagement starts
ThenProcess and tool map, hours lost per finding, fixed price per fix
- 02 Order to invoice
When an order or job arrives
ThenOne record created and carried through each stage to billing
- 03 Exception review queue
When a workflow cannot complete
ThenThe record lands with an owner, who is alerted
- 04 Daily operations brief
When each morning
ThenLate work, risks and owners summarised from live data
- 05 Automation register
When a workflow is built or changed
ThenOwner, purpose and systems touched recorded in one list
The numbers we move
How a COOs and heads of operations build is judged.
Every build has a number written into the blueprint. These are the ones COOs and heads of operations builds are measured by, and how we measure them.
| Metric | Before | After | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hours lost to manual work | Measured in the audit | Tracked per workflow after go-live | Hours per week spent re-typing, chasing and reporting, measured with the team before and after |
| Cycle time | Baseline from your records | Tracked weekly | Median time from order or job received to completed, read from the record |
| Silent failures | Found by customers | Alerted to an owner | Workflow failures detected by monitoring rather than by complaint, per month |
| Reporting lag | Compiled weekly by hand | Read live | Age of the newest data in the operations view |
Built on
The tools you already run, where we can.
Every tool we connect has its own page in the integrations directory.
Proof
Proof from builds like this.
- Customer story
Order and dispatch management system
Enquiry to invoice as one flow for a building materials supplier, with WhatsApp updates to five kinds of stakeholder and about 40% less manual time.
Read the story - Customer story
Multi-user production dashboard
A live multi-user production dashboard for a copper wire manufacturer, with about 45% faster order processing and about 60% better data accuracy.
Read the story
How it starts
An audit of the COOs and heads of operations work your team still does by hand.
One to two weeks. We map the workflows, put an hours-a-week figure on each, and give you a costed blueprint in order of payback. The audit is credited in full to the build.
- Week 1 to 2Audit. We sit with the people who do the work and map it.
- Week 3Blueprint. Fixed scope, fixed price, the first build chosen by payback.
- Week 4 onBuild in two-week sprints, working software every second Friday.
- After go-liveSixty days of hypercare, then a care plan or run it yourself.
What this does not do
So the scope is clear before the call.
- Replacing your ERP or core systems. We build the work around them.
- Strategy consulting without a build. We measure, then fix.
- Headcount reduction programmes. We remove repetitive work, the decisions about roles stay with you.
Terms, defined
COOs and heads of operations terms, in plain English.
- Automation register
- A list of every automation in the business, with its owner, purpose and the systems it touches.
- Review queue
- Where records that a workflow cannot handle are sent, with the context attached, for a person to decide.
- Hypercare
- The period straight after go-live when the builder watches the workflow closely and fixes issues fast.
Questions
What people ask about COOs and heads of operations automation.
Where do we start if everything feels urgent?
With the audit. It ranks findings by hours lost and cost, so the first build is the one with the clearest return, not the loudest complaint.
How do I make the case to the CEO or board?
The audit report gives each fix a fixed price and the hours it removes, measured on your own work. That is the business case, in your numbers rather than ours.
Who owns the automations once they are live?
You do. Every workflow has a named owner on your side, runs in accounts in your name, and is documented. A care plan from $50 a month adds monitoring and support if you want us watching it.
Will this disrupt the team while it is built?
We build alongside the current process and switch over one workflow at a time, usually in two-week sprints, with the old way kept until the new one is proven.
What does it cost?
The audit is $500, credited to the build. Builds start at $2,500 at a fixed price and most land between $5,000 and $15,000.
Reading
- Operations
Who noticed when the workflow stopped?
Most automation failures are silent: the run shows green and nothing happens for weeks. How it happens in Zapier and n8n, its cost, and the four checks we add.
- Strategy
We tried AI and nothing stuck
The sentence we hear on most first calls is rarely about the AI. Four reasons small companies abandon tools, and the change that makes the next try stick.
- Systems
Six months of AI agents in production: what broke
Not the model. Field renames, a drifting confidence score, a new invoice format and a Slack channel nobody read. What failed in our agents, and what we changed.
Related
- Function
Operations
The order moves through the business without anyone re-typing it, and everyone who needs to know, knows.
- Function
Back office
The admin layer that quietly consumes your team’s week, handled by systems instead.
- Industry
Manufacturing
Production entered once at the machine. Stock that matches the shelf. Dispatch paperwork and customer messages that send themselves. All of it live this morning, not typed up tonight.
- Role
CFOs and finance directors
You want the close faster, the numbers trusted and every spend justified. We give you a fixed price per fix, an audit trail on every step, and approvals that stay with people.
- Role
Founders and CEOs
If every answer runs through you, the business is capped at your hours. We put the routine work into systems your team owns, so you can spend the week on what only you can do.
By role: CFOs and finance directors, Founders and CEOs, Heads of sales and RevOps, Heads of customer support, CIOs and IT leads, HR and people leads, Marketing leads
COOs and heads of operations
Get the COOs and heads of operations hours back.
Bring the one COOs and heads of operations workflow your team still runs by hand. You leave the call with a yes or no on fit and the first thing we would build.
Book the call