For small businesses in El Paso

The Busywork Audit

Tell me the task you'd never do again if you didn't have to. I'll look at how your business actually runs, and tell you honestly whether it's worth automating — and if it isn't, I'll say that instead.

Most small business owners I talk to know they "should be using AI" by now and have no idea what that means for their shop. That isn't a knowledge problem. There's no shortage of tools. What's missing is somebody who will look at how you actually work and say what to fix first.

So that's what this is. I come by — or we do a screen-share if you're not in El Paso — and I watch how the work really moves: the orders, the inbox, the schedule, the paperwork, whatever eats your afternoons. Then you get one page.

What's on the page

  1. The three chores worth automating, in order

    Each one with what it costs you today — hours, mistakes, missed calls — and roughly what it would cost to make it go away.

  2. What to leave alone, and why

    Some things are too rare to bother with, too risky to hand to software, or genuinely cheaper to keep doing by hand. Those get named too.

  3. The first step, priced

    One concrete thing to do next, with a number on it. Not a range, not "starting at," not a discovery phase.

Described like that it still sounds abstract, so here is the shape of it. This is an example, not a real business:

Busywork audit — example
1
Retyping supplier invoices into the accounting system ~40 a week, by hand, usually after close
3 hrs/wk
2
Answering the same four questions by phone hours, prices, do-you-carry, where-are-you
2 hrs/wk
3
Rebuilding the weekly sales figure from two systems every Monday morning, twice, because they disagree
1 hr/wk
Leave alone: the end-of-year inventory count (once a year — automating it costs more than doing it) and anything touching customer refunds (too risky to hand over; keep a person on it).
First step: invoices land in the accounting system on their own, with you approving each one.
$850

One page. Three chores, what they cost, what not to touch, and one number. The figures above are illustrative — yours would be your own, measured while I watched.

It's useful even if you never hire me. You could hand it to somebody else and they'd know what to build. That's on purpose.

What it costs

Right now, nothing. I'm doing these free for the first El Paso businesses that'll have me, because I'm learning as much from them as they're getting from me. Later they'll be paid, and credited against the first build if you decide to go ahead.

There's no catch in that, but there is a reason: I'd rather be judged on a page you can hold than on a pitch.

What it isn't

  • Not a "free consultation call." You get something written, that you keep.
  • Not a sales pitch with a report stapled to it. If the honest answer is "keep doing that by hand," that's what the page says.
  • Not a proposal for some big system. The whole point is finding the one chore worth removing first.
  • Not a commitment. Take the page and do nothing with it — that's a fine outcome, and it still cost you nothing.

Why "leave it alone" is the important part

Anyone can hand you a list of things to automate. A chatbot will give you the average list in four seconds.

The hard part isn't the list. It's being willing to tell you which ideas aren't worth your money.

I've had to do that to my own work. I built a messaging feature into a pharmacy delivery system, finished it, and then cut it, because the vendor wouldn't sign the agreement that would have made it safe to use around patient information. That was my own code and my own time, and it still had to go.

What happens to what I see

An audit means looking at your real work — your inbox, your orders, your paperwork. So, plainly: I look, I take my own notes, and I don't copy your data anywhere. Nothing gets loaded into a tool, kept in a file, or used as an example for somebody else. Names and account numbers don't go in the write-up; the page describes the chore, not your customers.

If you'd rather I not see something, say so and we'll work around it — I can usually tell what a task costs you from watching you do it once, without reading what's inside. And if your business is one where that matters more than most — medical, legal, financial — tell me up front and I'll put it in writing before I look at anything.

Who this is for

Small businesses in El Paso where the owner is still personally doing something repetitive every week — retyping orders, chasing paperwork, copying numbers between two systems, answering the same question on the phone for the tenth time. If that's you, there's usually an hour or two a week sitting right there in plain sight.

If you run a Minecraft server instead of a storefront, the equivalent is the TickWatch diagnostic — same idea, different world: measure it, name the cause, say what not to touch.

Josh Kammeraad, founder of Liberty Coding
Josh Kammeraad
Liberty Coding LLC — El Paso, Texas

That's who turns up. Not an account manager, not a team you never meet — me, with a notepad, for an hour.

Want one?

Tell me the chore you'd never do again. That's the whole intake.