The problem
In most small businesses, one person is the answering machine for the whole team. "When does the Friday produce order land?" "Who supplies the oat milk, and what's the lead time?" "What's the ETA on the part for the Civic in bay two?" Every one of those questions stops what the owner or manager is doing, because the answer lives in their head, their inbox, or a spreadsheet only they know how to read.
None of those interruptions is a big deal on its own. Together, they're why the owner never gets a full hour of uninterrupted work.
What I built
A chat assistant connected to the kind of record most businesses already keep: a spreadsheet of what's on order — items, quantities, arrival dates, vendor details. Anyone on the team mentions the bot in team chat, names an item in plain language, and gets the answer back in seconds, right in the conversation:
"When does the black large bag land?" → arrival date and quantities on order. "Who's the vendor?" → name, rep, email, phone, and terms. "How many did we order?" → both ordered and vendor-confirmed counts.
It handles the way people actually type, not just exact commands. Ask a follow-up in the same thread — "how many?", "when again?" — and the bot remembers which item you're talking about without being asked twice. Misspell "vendor" and it answers anyway. Ask for the order date, the SKU, or the category, and it pulls the right column. Update the spreadsheet and the bot's answers update with it — the sheet stays the single source of truth, and nobody has to learn a new system.
This one is a working demo, built and running in my own systems against a sample retail inventory — not a client engagement, which is why it's listed separately from the case studies. Those are reserved for real engagements with real numbers, and I'd rather show you a demo honestly labeled than dress one up. The demo runs on Slack; the same build adapts to whatever your team actually uses for chat.
The time math
Use your own numbers, but here's the shape of it: 10 lookup questions a day, at roughly 4 minutes of interruption each (the question, the lookup, the getting-back-to-what-you-were-doing), is about 40 minutes a day — 14+ hours a month of the most expensive person in the building doing the work of a search box. At a $50/hour owner-time value, that's roughly $700/month leaking into interruptions.
Don't have clean records? That's part of the project.
Most small businesses don't have a tidy source of truth — the vendor list is in someone's contacts, delivery schedules live in email threads. The bot only needs a spreadsheet, and setting that sheet up is part of the build, not a prerequisite. If you can keep a spreadsheet current, you can have this. You end up with two assets: organized order and vendor records, and a bot that answers from them.
How it's delivered
As a standalone, fixed-quote à la carte project — no diagnostic or retainer required. We scope it on a free 30-minute call, I quote a fixed price, and I hand it over working, with your team trained on it. An optional keep-it-running plan covers updates as your vendors and menus change.