Automation consulting
For teams who intend to build in-house but want the strategy, platform choice and standards settled first. We provide the plan, the cost modelling and the review — your people do the building.
Who this is for
You have someone technical — an ops person who is good with Zapier, a developer with spare capacity, a finance analyst who has taught themselves Make. They can build. What they do not have is the experience of having watched automation programmes fail, so they do not know which decisions are expensive to reverse.
Platform choice is one. Naming and folder conventions are another. Whether to centralise automation in one team or federate it. How to handle credentials so the whole thing does not collapse when someone leaves. Where the boundary sits between "let people build their own" and "this needs review."
Those are cheap to decide correctly at the start and expensive to fix at scenario number sixty.
What we deliver
- Platform selection with cost modelling. Make versus n8n versus Zapier versus Power Automate for your volume and logic complexity, modelled over three years including the self-hosting option. Usually the answer surprises people.
- A twelve-month automation roadmap. Sequenced by payback and dependency, so you are not building the thing that needs clean data before the thing that cleans the data.
- Governance and standards. Naming conventions, folder structure, error-handling patterns, credential management, environments, and what has to be reviewed before it goes live.
- Build-versus-buy analysis on the specific automations you are considering, including the honest cases where an off-the-shelf product is cheaper than anything you would build.
- Capability assessment. An honest read on whether your team can deliver the roadmap, what skills are missing, and whether hiring or outsourcing the first build is the better move.
- Review sessions. Ongoing scenario and code review as your team builds, so problems get caught before they are load-bearing.
Engagement shapes
Strategy sprint — $4,000 to $8,000. Two to three weeks. Platform decision, roadmap, standards document, capability read. Delivered as a written strategy plus a working session with your team.
Advisory retainer — from $2,000/month. A standing half-day a month: review what your team has built, unblock what they are stuck on, adjust the roadmap. Cancellable with 30 days notice.
Second opinion — $1,500. A single fixed-fee review of a proposal, a platform decision, or a quote from another vendor, with a written recommendation. Blunt by design.
What we will tell you honestly
Sometimes the consulting answer is that you should not build in-house. If your automation needs amount to four workflows and no roadmap beyond them, hiring or training someone to own that is worse value than paying for the builds and a retainer.
We will say so, even though it means a smaller engagement. It is a better outcome than selling you a governance framework for a stack that does not need one.
Should you hire an ops person or automate?
Hire, when…
The work needs judgement, relationships or physical presence. Volume is unpredictable and lumpy. Processes are still changing monthly. Or the role covers a lot of ground and automation would address only a slice of it.
Automate, when…
The work is high-volume, rule-driven and stable. The cost of a human error is high. The task is genuinely dull and creates retention problems. Or you need it to happen at 3am and on weekends.
The arithmetic
A US operations hire is roughly $55,000 to $85,000 a year fully loaded. A build that removes 15 hours a month of the same work costs $8,000 to $18,000 once, plus support. The comparison is only fair if the automation genuinely covers the whole role — and it usually does not, which is the part vendors leave out.
The realistic answer for most businesses is both: automate the rule-driven core so the person you hire spends their time on the judgement work you actually needed them for.
Common questions
Is n8n or Make better for a small business?
Make is usually the better default: no infrastructure to run, a larger connector library, and a visual editor non-developers can follow. It is priced per operation, so cost rises with volume. n8n wins when you have high execution volume where per-operation pricing gets painful, when you need self-hosting for data residency or compliance, or when your logic is complex enough to want real code inside nodes. The crossover point depends on your volume, which is exactly what the cost model in a strategy sprint works out.
Can you just review a quote we received from another vendor?
Yes — that is the $1,500 second opinion. We look at scope, assumptions, platform choice and price against what the work should realistically involve, and give you a written view. Sometimes the answer is that the quote is fair and you should proceed with them.
Will you train our team?
We do practical, project-based enablement: working alongside your people on a real automation rather than running a generic course. It is usually folded into an advisory retainer or a build project. We do not sell standalone training courses, because they do not stick.
What if we start consulting and then decide we want you to build it?
That is a normal path and the consulting work carries straight over — the roadmap and standards become the build plan. We do not double-charge for the discovery already done, and the strategy sprint fee is credited against the first build if it starts within three months.
Do you have a platform you are incentivised to recommend?
No. We hold no reseller agreements, take no affiliate commission, and do not resell licences. You buy your own subscriptions directly. That is deliberate, because it is the only way a platform recommendation means anything.
Get the plan before you build
Thirty minutes on what your team is trying to do. We will tell you whether you need a strategy sprint, a second opinion, or just to go ahead and build it.
Related: Automation audit · Workflow automation · Pricing