We talk a lot about the Foundation Client Program in the abstract — priority access, one process at a time, that sort of thing. This post is about what one build inside it actually looked like, start to finish. Details are anonymised, but the shape of the problem will be familiar to a lot of small businesses.
The problem: a job that ate three hours a week
The client — a services business with a small back office — had new job requests coming in through three channels: a contact form, email, and the occasional phone call jotted on a sticky note. Someone had to check all three, decide if the request was real, then manually copy the details into a spreadsheet that doubled as their job tracker.
Nothing about this was hard. It just never stopped. Roughly three hours a week, spread across a team member’s day in ten-minute interruptions, on work that required zero judgement.
Mapping it before touching a single tool
Before building anything, we sat down and mapped the process exactly as it existed — not as anyone assumed it worked. That surfaced a few things nobody had mentioned upfront: phone requests were sometimes forgotten entirely, the spreadsheet had three slightly different column layouts depending on who last edited it, and there was no way to tell a duplicate entry from a new one.
This is the step people are usually keenest to skip, and it’s the one that matters most. An automation built on top of a messy process just makes the mess move faster.
What we built
The fix wasn’t glamorous. We standardised the contact form as the single intake point, set up a simple workflow that pulled new submissions straight into a cleaned-up tracker, flagged likely duplicates automatically, and sent a Slack notification to the right person with everything they needed to actually action the job — no copying required.
Phone requests still happen, but now they go through a two-minute form instead of a sticky note, so they land in the same system as everything else.
The result
Three hours a week back, but the bigger win was consistency. Nothing gets missed, nothing gets logged twice, and the person who used to own this admin now spends that time on client work instead. The client didn’t need a platform overhaul or a new piece of software to learn — just their existing tools, wired together properly.
What this means if you’re considering the program
This is a fairly small example on purpose. Most of the highest-value automation opportunities in a small business aren’t dramatic — they’re the repetitive, low-judgement tasks that quietly eat someone’s week. The Foundation Client Program exists to find those and fix them one at a time, with the client’s actual process as the starting point rather than a generic template.
If you’ve got a process like this sitting in your business — everyone knows it’s inefficient, nobody’s had time to fix it — get in touch. Spots in the program are still limited, which is exactly why they work.