Custom Business Operating Systems
One system your business actually runs on.
Not another tool bolted onto the six you already have. One place where the jobs, the people, the paperwork and the money live together, built around how your business works rather than how a software company thinks it should.
- Price
- Fixed price, quoted from the analysis
- Timeframe
- Agreed with the scope, before anything starts.
- You get
- One system the business runs on, at the size you need, and yours to keep
- Best for
- Established businesses whose work runs on procedure
Custom systems are one of the things we build inside a Tech Partnership, when off-the-shelf software won't do.
Most businesses this size run five or six pieces of software that were each a sensible decision on their own, and were never meant to work together.
A custom business operating system is the alternative: one application that the whole operation runs through. Enquiries, jobs, scheduling, people and their tickets, compliance records, invoicing. Not six products stitched together with exports and spreadsheets, but one thing, shaped around the way your business already works.
Custom matters here. Off-the-shelf software makes you work the way it was designed, and every business we've built for has at least one process that is genuinely theirs: the thing they do better than their competitors, or the thing their regulator insists on. That's the part a generic system forces you to work around.
What it looks like in use.
Everything about a job in one record, and the whole business in one place, on a desk in the office and on a phone on site.
Departments are colour-coded consistently, so the same job is recognisable wherever it appears. That coding is the same one we use when we map the business, which is not a coincidence.
What it does for the business.
Not features. The things that stop happening, and the things that start.
One record, one version
A job exists once. Everyone who touches it — office, site, accounts — is looking at the same record rather than their own copy of it, so there's nothing to reconcile and nothing to re-type.
The system knows what happens next
Work moves between people because the system moves it, not because somebody remembered to. Steps don't get skipped, and nothing sits in an inbox waiting to be noticed.
Everything findable, first time
The quote, the photos, the signed sheet, the certificate and the invoice all hang off the same job. Finding something stops being a task somebody has to stop working to do.
The procedure is the software
How the work should be done is built into the thing people use, rather than written in a document nobody opens. The two can't drift apart, because they're the same object. This is also the part people feel: some of them will have to work differently, and it only sticks if the new way is genuinely easier than the one it replaced.
Reporting that falls out of the work
Because the work is recorded as it happens, the numbers already exist. No month-end assembly job, no spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand, and an audit trail you didn't have to build afterwards.
Ground that automation can stand on
Most businesses can't automate anything because the information is scattered across six places and three formats. Once it's in one place and in a known shape, the repetitive jobs become removable.
Three Sizes, One Job
How big is the thing you need?
These aren't three different products. They're three sizes of the same one, and you can start at any of them. The figures below are floors rather than prices — the smallest a build of that size sensibly is, not what yours will cost, which comes out of the analysis. Whichever you buy, the whole business gets mapped first, so the piece we build is designed to connect to whatever comes next, even if nothing ever does.
One job
A single process, done properly. Certification tracking. Job sheets from site to office. Quoting. The smallest thing that removes a real weekly cost, and small enough that you find out what we're like before you commit to anything bigger. Builds of this size start at £12,000.
One part of the business
A department, end to end. People, finance, operations, sales or compliance. Big enough to change how a team works. This is where most clients start. Builds of this size start at £30,000.
The whole business
All of it, connected, including the handovers between departments, which is where most of the cost hides. It's the biggest thing we build and rarely where anyone starts. Most arrive with one thing on fire and end up here. There's no starting figure worth printing for this one: it's quoted from the analysis, because the number depends entirely on what the analysis finds.
Merthyr Town FC runs the whole club on one: commercial partnerships, the box office, memberships, board reporting and matchday food. See the case studyWhichever size, it starts the same way: a business analysis — included in a Tech Partnership, or on its own from £3,000 — which is where the size gets decided rather than guessed. What that involves
Not sure what's right for you?
Take the 5-minute assessment. 12 quick questions, and we'll tell you honestly whether you need a partnership, a one-off build, or nothing from us at all.
Not sure which size? Tell us what your week looks like and we'll tell you.
Book a 30-minute callWhat it opens up.
A system that holds the whole business is worth having on its own. It's also the thing that makes the next two possible, and neither is possible without it.
AI automation, and agents that work inside it
Once the work runs through one system, the repetitive parts become obvious, and removable. Chasing, re-keying, checking a thing twice because nobody trusts the first check. Beyond that, AI agents can sit inside the system and do real jobs in it: reading what comes in and filing it against the right record, drafting the quote from the site notes, flagging the job that's about to slip. None of that is possible while the information is spread across six tools in three formats. Building the system is what makes it possible.
About AI automation and integrationProcedure that stays true
How the job should be done ends up inside the thing people use, rather than in a document that described the business as it was three years ago. New starters learn the process by using it. When something changes, it changes in one place. Most businesses have a written procedure and a real one, and they stopped matching a long time ago: this is what closes that gap and keeps it closed.
Who this is for.
Established businesses whose work runs on procedure: where broadly the same kinds of job come through week after week, and the expensive part is the admin around the work rather than the work itself. If that's you, this is the thing. If it's one of the four below, it isn't, and we'd rather say so than take the meeting.
You know exactly what you want built and you want it built. That's a different service and it's cheaper. See software development.
The work is different every time and there's no repeatable process underneath it.
The business is already properly systemised and nothing about it frustrates you.
You want the software to fix a problem that's really about how the work is organised. We'd tell you that, and you'd have paid us to say it.
If none of those sound like you, the conversation is free and usually useful.
The questions this usually raises.
Not sure which size you need?
That's a normal place to start. Tell us what your week looks like and we'll tell you honestly whether it's a small job, a big one, or not a software problem at all.