Advertisement
Most businesses that come to us for automation know they're spending too much time on manual work. What they don't know is where the biggest time savings are, which automations should come first, and what the realistic ROI looks like. A free automation plan answers all three questions before you spend a penny on implementation.
What a Free Automation Plan Includes
Process audit: We map your current workflows — lead intake, follow-up sequences, order processing, customer support, reporting, invoicing. We identify every touchpoint where a human is doing a task a machine could do.
Time accounting: We calculate the actual hours being spent on automatable tasks. Most businesses are shocked by this number. In our Shopify store case study, the store owner was spending 28 hours per week on tasks that were fully automatable — nearly a full-time employee's worth of work.
ROI calculation: We attach a financial value to each automation opportunity. Hours saved × hourly cost of staff + revenue impact (faster lead response, recovered carts, reduced churn). This tells you the financial case before implementation.
Prioritised roadmap: We rank automation opportunities by impact-to-effort ratio. The highest-impact, lowest-effort automations come first — generating ROI quickly and building confidence before tackling more complex workflows.
Tool recommendation: We specify which tools (n8n, Zapier, Klaviyo, WhatsApp Business API, etc.) best fit your requirements, taking into account your tech stack, GDPR requirements, and budget.
The 5-Step Process
Step 1: Initial intake (30 minutes) We ask about your business: team size, revenue range, main processes, current tools, biggest time drains. No technical knowledge required from your side — we ask the right questions.
Step 2: Process documentation (we do this) Based on your intake, we document your current workflows in detail. We may ask follow-up questions via email.
Step 3: Opportunity identification We map every manual process against automation capability: what can be automated, how complex the automation is, what tools connect which systems.
Step 4: Automation plan delivery (3–5 business days) You receive a written automation plan: prioritised list of automations, estimated time savings, estimated implementation cost, and expected ROI for each.
Step 5: Review call (30 minutes) We walk through the plan together, answer questions, and help you decide which automations to implement and in what order.
What Businesses Typically Discover
The most commonly identified automation opportunities, across all business types:
Lead follow-up sequences: Form submitted → CRM entry → personalised email sequence → sales task created. Businesses doing this manually have inconsistent follow-up times (hours to days) and miss leads that go cold. Automating this reduces lead response time to under 60 seconds and increases conversion rates by 15–40%.
Customer communication: Order confirmations, appointment reminders, delivery updates, post-purchase review requests. These repetitive messages are sent manually by most SMEs. Automating saves 3–8 hours per week and improves customer experience at the same time.
Reporting: Weekly sales summaries, monthly P&L inputs, performance dashboards. A business spending 4–6 hours per month pulling data for reports is spending £500–£1,200/year on work that takes n8n 5 minutes. See how n8n automates business reporting.
Customer support triage: Classifying incoming queries, auto-responding to common questions, routing complex issues. The automation setup that reduced support by 60% consistently shows up as one of the highest-ROI automations for businesses with a dedicated support function.
Invoice and payment follow-up: Generating invoices on project completion, sending payment reminders at 7/14/30 days overdue, updating CRM when payment received. Businesses with overdue invoices are losing both cash flow and staff time.
What the Plan Does NOT Include
The free automation plan is a strategic document, not an implementation. It tells you what to automate and in what order. Implementation is a separate engagement with its own cost and timeline.
The plan is genuinely free and there's no obligation to use us for implementation. Many businesses take the plan and implement the simpler automations themselves using Zapier or n8n. Others use the plan as a brief to get implementation quotes from multiple providers.
Is a Free Automation Plan Right for You?
The plan delivers most value for businesses that:
- Have a team (even part-time) spending significant time on repetitive tasks
- Are generating consistent revenue but feel operationally stretched
- Know they should be automating but aren't sure where to start
- Want to scale without hiring proportionally
If you're a solo founder with minimal admin, the plan is less valuable — the automation needs are lower. If you're an established business with 3+ team members doing repetitive process work, the plan is likely to identify £10,000–£50,000+ in annual time savings.
For context on what automation looks like in practice, see the complete guide to automating your business without hiring, the hidden costs of not automating, and the manual-to-automated business workflows guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this actually free — what's the catch?
There's no catch and no obligation. We offer free automation plans because most businesses that go through the process see the ROI clearly and proceed with implementation — often with us, sometimes independently. It's a business development tool for us that delivers genuine value for you regardless of what you decide.
How long does the whole process take?
From initial intake to plan delivery: 5–7 business days. Including the review call: 1–2 weeks total. This is significantly faster than traditional consulting processes.
Do I need technical knowledge to go through this process?
No. We ask about your business processes, not your technology. "We manually enter every new order into our spreadsheet and then email a confirmation" is enough for us to understand the automation opportunity — you don't need to know how automation works.
Advertisement
