The companion to The Automatic Business
The Workshop
Every "Try This" exercise from the book, rebuilt as a free interactive worksheet. Do the exercise right here in your browser. No account, no card, no catch: an email is only ever asked for if you want to save your work or share it.
The first worksheets are being built now. Be first through the door.
Being built first
Three exercises lead the way, in this order.
Chapter 7
The SaaS Spaghetti Audit
Map every tool you pay for onto the four blocks of your business. Get your total monthly spend, your most crowded block, and a shareable map of your spaghetti.
Chapter 20
The You Replacement Map
List everything that still runs only through you, and route each to where it should live instead: a system, a person, or the Keystone.
Chapter 3
Triage Your Bottleneck List
Sort your task list into Human, Automation, or AI. The machine proposes a triage with its reasoning; you overrule it where it is wrong.
All twenty exercises
One per chapter, same order as the book.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 1: You Are the Bottleneck
The Bottleneck Log
Track one ordinary working day and capture every decision, approval, answer and fix that stops and waits for you.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 2: From Technician to Architect
Describe the Outcome
Take one weekly task only you do and write the single sentence describing the result it should produce with no input from you.
- Being built first
Chapter 3: The Triage: Human, Automation, or AI
Triage Your Bottleneck List
Sort your task list into Human, Automation, or AI. The machine proposes a triage with its reasoning; you overrule it where it is wrong.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 4: AI Is Not Automation
The Rule Test
Take every fuzzy question-marked task and ask: could this be written as a clear rule? Everything that can moves to automation.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 5: Your Brilliant New Hire
Brief It Properly
Brief an AI on one task with context, an example of good work, and the format you want. Compare the result against a lazy one-liner.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 6: The 80/20 of Where to Start
Pick Your First Build
Score each automation candidate for value and effort, find the highest-value lowest-effort winner, and write its one-line done sentence.
- Being built first
Chapter 7: The Map of Your Business
The SaaS Spaghetti Audit
Map every tool you pay for onto the four blocks of your business. Get your total monthly spend, your most crowded block, and a shareable map of your spaghetti.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 8: Keystone: Your Company's Second Brain
Only You Know This
Write down three or more things only you would know if you vanished tomorrow. They become the first entries in your Keystone.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 9: Building and Maintaining Your Keystone
Your First Process Archaeology
Record someone narrating a process only they know, including what they do when it goes wrong, and turn it into a step-by-step guide.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 10: Connecting Everything: Automation Without Code
Design Your First Connector
Write your first automation in plain words: when this happens, do this. Then add one filter for when it should not run and one failsafe alert.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 11: Your Client Operating System
Sketch Your Pipeline Spec
Draw the stages a stranger passes through to become a client, and beside each write the one thing that should happen automatically.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 12: Killing Errors: Accuracy and Consistency
Find Your Missing Guardrails
For the last three things that slipped: was it really a person's fault, or a missing system? What single alert would have caught it first?
- On the waitlist
Chapter 13: Communications That Build Trust
Write the Perfect First Reply
Write the ideal warm, personal, helpful reply to a new enquiry with one clear next step. That becomes the brief for a message that sends itself forever.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 14: Digital Teammates: Delegating to Bots and AI
Job Descriptions for Bots
Write down the three recurring 'I must remember to' worries you carry, and ask for each: could a digital teammate hold this instead of me?
- On the waitlist
Chapter 15: What Gets Measured Gets Managed
Your Three Numbers
Choose the only three numbers that would tell you whether your business is healthy today. They are the start of your dashboard.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 16: Systemising Delivery
The Must-Happen List
Take your most repeated delivery process and write down only what must happen every time, for every client, with no exceptions.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 17: Automating Marketing and Growth
Build Your First Flywheel
Answer the one question every good prospect asks, once, as a piece of content. Then set it up to capture and gently nurture the people it attracts.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 18: Buying Back Your Time
The Buy-Back Tally
List the five tasks you most want off your plate, price the hours each eats using your true hourly rate, and name what you will do with the first ten reclaimed hours.
- On the waitlist
Chapter 19: Everything Is Not a Priority
Build Your One List
Put every task from every corner of your life onto one single list, order it by comparing pairs until the top three lines are genuinely the most important, and do the top one.
- Being built first
Chapter 20: Maintaining, Not Micromanaging
The You Replacement Map
List everything that still runs only through you, and route each to where it should live instead: a system, a person, or the Keystone.
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