We are four people and everybody is on the floor. Who is supposed to run this?
Nobody, ideally. If a system needs a person to maintain it, it will not survive in a shop this size — we have watched that happen. So we build things that run without attention and interrupt you only when a decision is genuinely yours: a price to set, an order to accept, a visit to confirm. If a build cannot pass that test we do not ship it.
What does this cost, and how do we know it is worth it at our size?
The scope and the price are written down before work starts, and neither moves without your agreement. As for worth it — we pick a number first. Usually it is quotes returned the same day, or enquiries answered at all. If that number does not move after the build, the build did not work, and we would rather find that out with you than pretend otherwise.
Visitors ask us about wheelchair access and whether it suits kids. Can software answer that honestly?
It can hold the answer, but you write it. We put the real access details, the real duration and the real conditions on the page so somebody deciding whether to drive here can decide properly. What we will not do is have a machine improvise an answer about whether a place is safe for a family. That copy is yours, approved once, and reused.
We are a shop on Harrison Street, not a factory. Is any of this aimed at us?
Half of it is. The retail and food frontage here — Horner's Midtown Market, the Alexandria Bakery over on South Park Avenue, the independents in between — has the same underlying problem as a fabrication floor, just with different words on it. Somebody asks a question, nobody is free to answer it, and the answer arrives after the person has decided. What we build for a counter is smaller and cheaper than what we build for a job shop, and it is usually one thing: a single place where the phone, the form and the social account all land.
Our records go back twenty years in filing cabinets and a spreadsheet. Does any of that come across?
Usually enough of it to matter. Customer lists, past jobs and prices generally import cleanly. Paper is a judgement call — we will scan and index what still earns its keep and leave the rest in the cabinet, because digitising two decades of dead files is a bill you do not need. And whatever goes in comes back out: everything exports in a standard format on request.
Could this send a quote out on its own if we were busy?
It could, and we will not build it that way. A price is a commitment and it needs the person who understands the machine, the material and the customer behind it. What the system does is have the draft, the past prices and the drawing ready so setting the number takes two minutes instead of forty.
Do we have to stop using the accounting package we have had for years?
No. If your books work, keep them. We build the part that is missing and connect it, which is usually the front end — the enquiries, the quotes, the orders — rather than the ledger. Replacing something functional is expensive, risky, and rarely the reason a business is struggling.
Where is your team, and does that make a difference in practice?
United States, and the people who scope your job are the people who build it — there is no offshore hand-off in the middle. In practice the difference is that you can describe a problem in the words you actually use and not have to translate it. We sign an NDA whenever you want one.