People ask what happens in a Walkthrough often enough that it's worth writing down. Here is the week, hour by hour.
Day one: we sit with you. Not in a meeting room — on the floor, at the desk next to the person doing the work. We watch the actual work move: how an enquiry becomes a quote, how a receipt becomes a ledger entry, how a Tuesday afternoon disappears. We talk to the operators, not just the owners. The owner's description of a workflow and the operator's reality of it usually differ in exactly the places worth automating.
We take notes in a structured format: every task we see, how long it takes, how often it happens, what tools it touches, and — the important column — how much judgement it actually requires.
Days two to four: we do the analysis. Off-site. We turn the notes into a map of where the hours go, then sort every workflow into three buckets:
Automate — high-volume, structured, judgement-light. The quote that's 90% identical to last week's quote. This is where systems get built.
Assist — work that needs a human decision but not human typing. Draft-for-review territory. Often the highest-value bucket, because it returns hours without removing the person's judgement from the loop.
Leave alone — work that's genuinely human, or too rare to be worth a system, or load-bearing in some way that isn't obvious. We're explicit about this bucket. Some of the most expensive automation mistakes are things that should never have been automated.
Day five: you get the brief. Three to five pages, plain language, no slideware. It names the two or three highest-impact systems, what each would cost as a fixed-price Build, and the hours-returned estimate per system — with the arithmetic shown, so you can argue with it.
The brief is yours either way. Take it to another builder, build it in-house, or sit on it for a year. About a third of Walkthrough clients don't continue with us immediately, and that's fine — the brief is designed to be useful on its own, and the fee credits toward a Build whenever you're ready.
Why charge for it at all? Because free diagnostics produce dishonest briefs. A free Walkthrough has to end in a sales pitch to pay for itself. A paid one only has to end in the truth.