The real reason most SMB "automation" projects fail
It's not the tooling. It's not the budget. It's that nobody mapped the actual process before someone started building.
I've seen this pattern over and over: a team gets frustrated with a manual workflow, hires someone to "automate it," and six weeks later they have a tool that automates the wrong version of the process — because the person building it never sat down and asked how the work actually happens today, edge cases included.
Software doesn't fix a broken process. It just makes the broken process faster.
That's why every build we do at Office 104 starts with a scoping call before a single line of code gets written. We're not selling hours — we're selling a fixed price, fixed scope outcome, which means we have to get the scope right up front or we eat the cost of getting it wrong. That incentive alignment matters more than people think.
If you're an SMB owner or ops lead sitting on a manual process that's eating your team's time, happy to talk through what actually needs to happen before anyone touches a keyboard.
— Danielle, Office 104