I am one person with a chair and a phone. Are you seriously going to take that job?
Yes, at the right size. What a one-chair business usually needs is online booking with a deposit, a waiting list that fills cancellations, and a reminder that actually reduces no-shows. That is a small, fixed, finished piece of work — not an ongoing relationship — and if a product off the shelf does it for a few pounds a month we will tell you which one and take nothing.
Half my clients are in Hendricks County and half are here. Does that complicate things?
Only in the sense that different clients have different deadlines, and that is exactly the sort of thing worth putting into a system. Each engagement carries its own dates and its own outstanding list, so the calendar does the remembering. Where you are physically located matters far less than whether you can see, in one screen, which six files are not ready yet.
Our family owns ground my grandfather bought and nobody can find the agreement.
That is a real and common problem and it is fixable in a short piece of work. Everything gets attached to the parcel — the lease, the rent record, the drainage that was put in, the letters — and family members who live elsewhere get to see it without ringing whoever currently keeps the folder. It is worth doing before somebody dies rather than after, which is when most people call about it.
What would this cost against what a village business actually takes in a month?
Less than people expect, because the work is genuinely small. We map what happens now, quote one figure for a defined build, and list what is not included. For a sole trader that is usually a few weeks and a single invoice rather than anything ongoing. If the number we come back with looks wrong against your turnover, say so and we will either cut the scope or tell you not to do it.
If I close the business or hand it to my daughter, what happens to the client records?
They belong to the business and they go wherever the business goes, in ordinary files, at no cost. Client histories, appointment records, land documents — all exportable on request, none of it used to train anything, none of it sold. We write that in before you pay, because in a village the reputational cost of being casual with somebody’s records would end us immediately.
I keep hearing about AI. Is any of it relevant to a business as small as mine?
Some, but less than the advertising suggests, and we would rather be honest about it. Reading a receipt off a photograph, sorting an enquiry, filling a cancelled slot from a waiting list — those are useful and real. Deciding a price, judging a client’s file, choosing who gets assistance — those are not, and a system that pretended otherwise would be a liability. For a lot of one-person businesses the correct answer is a good booking page and nothing else.
Can the township afford this, and should it be spending money on it at all?
It should only spend if the current way is failing somebody, which usually shows up as slow decisions or records that vanish with an officer. The build for that is small and we scope it as a single figure with no recurring surprise. Public money in a township this size should buy something a resident can point at, and if we cannot describe the benefit in one sentence we would advise against it.
How much of my time will you need before there is anything to show?
An hour or two of conversation, then a drawing of your process that you correct, then a working version you try alongside the old way for a fortnight. We load whatever you already have — a diary, a spreadsheet, a folder of PDFs — rather than asking you to retype it. If we ever hand you a data-entry job, we have built the wrong thing.