About
Caleb Smith · Nelson, New Zealand · Every automation built and maintained personally — no junior team, no offshore handoff.
The origin
I'd spent years building automations — connecting systems, eliminating manual data entry — and kept running into the same frustrations: watching people re-enter the same data between two systems that should talk to each other, and the particular aggravation of fuzzy matching that never quite worked the way the tools promised.
When it does work, there's a real satisfaction in automating something someone's been doing by hand for a long time. Watching hours of weekly admin just disappear is a good feeling. I kept coming back to that.
The moment it clicked was a conversation about AI. I'd just finished building a knowledge base for my employer and was talking to someone about what AI could do. They asked me about it, and somewhere in that conversation I realised: what I'd been doing — building automations, making manual work disappear — was something other businesses needed, and would pay for.
What I wanted to build wasn't another "set it up and walk away" service. The cheap options do exactly that: they build something and leave you to deal with it when things break or when the tools move on. I wanted to offer something with a proper retainer — so when something stops working, there's someone to fix it. Someone who built it in the first place.
How it works in practice
Every automation I deliver is built and maintained by me personally. When something needs fixing, you're talking to the person who built it — not a support ticket, not a junior developer who inherited the code.
We start with a paid Automation Audit — half a day to map your workflows, find the two or three things that will make the most difference, and produce a costed plan. That fee is credited toward the build.
The build itself is scoped and fixed-price. We agree on what's in scope, I build it against your live systems, and hand it over with plain-English documentation and a walkthrough so your team knows exactly what now runs itself.
After that, a Care Retainer keeps it running: monitoring, fixes, small improvements, and a monthly report showing exactly how many hours it saved. Month-to-month — cancel any time. That last part matters. The retainer isn't a lock-in — it's there because good automation doesn't stay static. Systems get updated, edge cases appear, and things that worked last year sometimes need adjusting.
The tools
I use tools worth building a company on — ones that are reliable, well-supported, and won't leave your business stranded when a cheap SaaS tier disappears.
Book a paid Automation Audit. We find the time.
You decide if it's worth fixing.