Is This Worth Automating?
A project is worth automating when leaving it broken costs more than fixing it. We're talking about what it actually costs you over the next two or three years: time, errors, missed opportunities, risk. Most of the businesses we talk to underestimate what it actually costs by three to five times. This free assessment walks you through the math, then sends you a PDF brief you can use to decide or to share with a partner.
About ten minutes. No credit card. No obligation.
How It Works
The first step to making real progress is defining the problem clearly. That's what this tool is built to do.
You'll answer approximately twenty short questions across five sections. The questions are designed to surface what a process actually costs you today, including things you don't normally count: rework, missed opportunities, key-person risk, and the slow drift that happens when nobody fixes the thing.
At the end, the tool computes the current annual cost and the three-year exposure, gives you a verdict (Worth Pursuing Now, Worth Pursuing, or Not Yet), and produces a four-page PDF you can read in five minutes or forward to a partner. The PDF includes the math behind every number, so you can pressure-test our work.
The PDF deliberately doesn't propose a solution, a cost to build, or a timeline. Those numbers are unknown until a scoping conversation. The PDF tells you whether that conversation is worth having.
What You'll Get
- Verdict. A plain-language tier: Worth Pursuing Now, Worth Pursuing, or Not Yet. No hedging.
- Annual cost. What this work is costing you right now, computed from your inputs.
- Three-year exposure. What the problem will cost you over the next three years if nothing changes.
- Four-lens view. Hard cost savings, revenue gains, risk reduction, and team quality-of-life impact. Read about the framework.
- Questions to ask. Five to seven specific questions to think through before committing to a project.
- Dependencies to surface. The operational unknowns that will come up in a scoping call.
- What we're not telling you yet. An honest list of the numbers we can't give you without a conversation.
Who This Is For
Anyone weighing whether a specific business process is worth automating. Solo operators (real estate agents, consultants, small business owners) up through mid-market companies (revenue around forty million). The math questions are self-scaling. The same questions work for one person at seventy-five dollars an hour and a team of four at a blended fifty-five.
If you have a specific process in mind and you've been wondering whether to fix it, build a workaround, hire someone, or just live with it, the assessment will give you a clear-eyed read in about ten minutes.
A Few Examples
Worth pursuing now. A property manager spending twelve hours a week on invoice chaos, with two billing errors a month at fifteen hundred dollars each. Annual cost in the high seventy thousands. Three-year exposure into the quarter-million range. Math is strong, urgency is real, scoping call is the obvious next step.
Worth pursuing. A solo consultant spending five hours a week on intake and onboarding at seventy-five dollars an hour. No quantified errors. Annual cost around twenty thousand. Not at the top of the urgency list, but a real number worth a conversation.
Not yet. A side project losing an hour a week of someone's time at forty dollars an hour. Annual cost around two thousand. The math does not support automation today. The PDF will say so and tell you what would change that.
When Automation Isn't the Right Answer
Automation is the wrong move when the underlying process is broken, when the work is irregular enough that the rules can't be written down, when the volume is too low to justify the build cost, or when the people doing the work are the only ones who understand why it works the way it does. We wrote about this at length in When Not to Automate. The assessment is designed to flag these cases. A Not Yet verdict is honest information, not failure.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does the assessment take?
Most people finish in eight to twelve minutes. Approximately twenty short questions across five sections. You can skip optional ones.
Will you spam me?
No. You'll get one PDF in your inbox and at most one short follow-up email. No list-selling, ever.
What if my project is small?
The tool will tell you straight. If the math doesn't support automation, the verdict is Not Yet and the PDF explains why and what would change that. We won't pretend a small project is bigger than it is.
What if I don't have good data?
Best guesses are fine. The questions are written to work with rough numbers. The confidence label on your PDF reflects how complete your inputs were.
Will you propose a solution?
No. The PDF sizes the problem. It deliberately doesn't name tools, vendors, or implementation approaches. Those decisions belong in a scoping conversation after both sides understand the details.
Is the assessment really free?
Yes. No credit card required, no obligation. The brief is yours. If you want a thirty minute conversation after reading it, the calendar link is in the PDF.
Do you share my answers?
Individual answers are never shared externally. We use aggregate, de-identified patterns to improve the tool. See our privacy policy for details.
What happens after I submit?
The brief is prepared and reviewed by a human before being emailed to you. Most arrive within a few hours. Sometimes we need more information to do the math justice, in which case we will reach out to set up a quick Zoom or phone call before sending the brief.