All journeys

I want to automate my family's business

You are not selling this to anybody, which removes half the difficulty and adds a different half: it has to keep working when you are not there, for people who did not ask for it.

You end with: One real process running better than before, owned by somebody other than you.

Explore

Find out which task is worth it first. Most family-business automation fails on volume, not technology.

  1. The economics of automation — Why one job gets automated and the near-identical one next to it does not. (3 lessons, 65 min)

Build

Measurement before capability. You need to be able to prove it is not making things worse.

  1. Coffee break: the summariser you can prove is wrong — Twenty minutes to build it, twenty more to find out where it fails. The second half is the point. (2 lessons, 40 min)
  2. The eval you actually need — Stop reading leaderboards. Build the harness that measures your task, on your inputs. (4 lessons, 8 min)

Launch

The office process first; the growing system if the business has one.

  1. Ship one automation — Take one real process end to end, put it in front of people, and measure what it did for six weeks. (26 lessons, 1255 min)
  2. Build an autonomous greenhouse — A closed loop that runs for six weeks unattended, in a system where failure is measured in dead plants. (3 lessons, 100 min)