An assessment is a short, structured look at how work moves through your firm. It answers one question: what is worth automating first?
How it starts
I begin with a conversation about a normal week. Who receives client emails? Where do documents land? How does a quote become an invoice? Every time, I listen for work that is repeated, rule-based, and done by a skilled person who would rather be doing something else.
Then I talk to two or three of your team members separately. People who do the work daily know where time disappears, and they are often more precise about it than the owner.
What I look at
- Inbox and files: can anyone find a client’s last three emails in under a minute? Where do attachments end up?
- Intake and onboarding: how does a new client’s information get into your systems, and how many times is it retyped?
- Chasing: which requests for missing documents, signatures or payments are made by hand?
- Billing: how long between finishing work and sending the invoice?
- The tools you already own: most firms pay for features in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace that nobody has switched on.
What you get
A written plan, in plain language, with:
- A ranked list of what to automate, and what not to.
- For each item, an estimate of hours saved per month and what it would take to build.
- Any quick fixes that need no building at all.
- A recommended first project with a fixed price.
Sometimes the right answer is “fix the process first, then automate”. That is a useful result too, and it is better to hear it before you spend money on a build.
What usually comes first
In small firms, the first project is almost always one of three things: getting client email and files attached to the right client record, chasing missing documents automatically, or speeding up quote-to-invoice. They are unglamorous, and they tend to pay back quickly.
If you would like to see what this looks like for your firm, get in touch.