Who I help

AI automation for small businesses

For a small business, automation is almost never about technology. It is that a handful of repeated tasks are eating someone's week, and that someone is usually you. So find the two or three jobs costing the most hours, automate those properly, and leave the rest alone until the first ones have paid for themselves.

You probably recognise this

Where the time actually goes

None of these is dramatic on its own. Together they are why the week disappears.

  • You are the bottleneck for things that do not need your judgement
  • Growth means more admin, so more revenue costs more of your time
  • You have thought about hiring, mostly to handle the repetitive work
  • Software was bought to fix this and now you have five tools that do not talk
  • Nothing is broken enough to fix urgently, and all of it is expensive

Where to start

In this order, usually

Ordered by payback, not by how interesting they are to build. The first one on this list is where I would put your budget if you only had budget for one.

Whatever your inbox does most

For most small businesses the inbox is where the company actually runs. Enquiries, invoices, scheduling and support all land there. Sorting it automatically, and drafting the few replies you write constantly, usually pays back fastest.

AI support & sales agents

The handoff between winning work and doing it

The gap between a customer saying yes and the work starting is where small businesses lose the most unbilled hours. The folder, the invoice, the intake form, the kickoff email. Very repeatable, and almost never automated.

Business process automation

The report you rebuild every month

If someone assembles the same numbers on a schedule, that is a fixed recurring cost with a known value. It is also the easiest automation to verify, because you can compare the automated output to last month's manual one.

Data & reporting automation

And when it is not worth it

If a process runs a few times a month, changes shape every time, or genuinely needs a person's judgement at each step, automating it will cost more than it returns. I would rather tell you that on a free call than sell you a build you will resent. A significant share of audit calls end with me identifying one thing worth automating and three things worth leaving exactly as they are.

Why trust a new studio

No client logos yet. Commitments instead.

Lytheo is new, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose your trust. So here is what goes into every engagement agreement — enforceable, not decorative.

You own everything

Code, workflows, prompts and documentation transfer to you in writing on final payment. Everything runs in accounts registered to you. There is no Lytheo platform you must keep paying for to keep what you bought.

The audit is free, and yours regardless

You leave the first call with a written map of your automatable workflows and what each is worth — whether or not you hire me. If the honest answer is that nothing is worth automating yet, you get that in writing too.

One fixed price, agreed up front

No hourly billing. No change fees for my own misestimates. The price moves only if you change the scope, and only with your written agreement first.

You pay against working software

Milestones are demonstrable systems, not percentages of elapsed time. Nothing is invoiced before it ships.

Your data stays yours

Enterprise API tiers where your inputs are excluded from model training. Least-privilege access. An NDA signed on request before you tell me anything sensitive. On exit, credentials revoked and my working copies deleted.

No lock-in, no notice period

Care plans run month to month. Cancel whenever you like, keep everything, and I hand over cleanly to whoever comes next.

Questions

Small businesses — common questions

Often yes, but only for specific processes. The test is straightforward: does a repetitive task consume more than roughly four hours a month, follow rules that can be written down, and run often enough that the shape of it is stable? If all three are true it will usually pay back within a few months. If a process is rare, ad hoc, or genuinely needs judgement each time, it will not.

No. What you need to bring is knowledge of how your business actually runs — where things get stuck, what your team complains about, which tasks nobody wants. That is the input that matters. Handover includes plain-English documentation and a recorded walkthrough, and the automations run in tools you already have accounts for.

One fixed price for the whole job, quoted after a free 30-minute call. Never hourly, so you know the number before anything starts. What drives it is how many systems the workflow touches and how many odd cases it has to handle. A clean workflow between two connected tools is a far smaller job than a six-step process spanning four systems.

That is not what these systems are usually for, and it is not what I optimise them for. In small businesses the constraint is almost always that the existing team is stretched across work below their pay grade — automation gives that capacity back rather than removing headcount. If your actual goal is to reduce headcount, you should say so early, because it changes what is worth building.

See all six services

Ready to get the hours back?

A free 30-minute audit call. You leave with a written map of your automatable workflows and what each one is worth — whether we end up working together or not.

Replies within 24 hours · No sales team — you talk to the builder

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