Automation
Automation is for the moments that are lost because nobody replied in time: not the moments nobody cares about, but the ones everyone cares about and nobody owns at five on a Friday. An audit of more than 2,000 US companies, published in the Harvard Business Review, found firms that replied to an enquiry within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation (HBR).
Automate the noticing, not the talking. Notice the moment, send what that person needs, and hand anything that matters to a named human.
in 4 cells
Why it matters for being chosen
Mostly Bought (did the step run without a stall?) and Answered. These moments earn 1.7 of Kestrel’s 18 points and lose 1.3. Their weight is in what they protect: a review that starts a week late damages everything after it.
Website enquiries: a median of 26 hours to a reply. Procurement’s documents: a median of 4 working days, by hand, from a shared drive. Reviews starting on the agreed date: 6 of 9.
Where your craft is
The judgement is in what must never be automated: a question like “will this work in our plant?” goes to a person. The craft is designing the hand-offs, the off switch and the guardrails, then reading the handovers every month.
The seven steps
The same anatomy as every build, with this build’s specifics and Kestrel’s example.
Draw the systems map: every system that holds a fact about a buyer, every event it can notice and every way it can reach someone. You can’t automate a moment no system can see.
Set the coverage unit: a trigger tied to a moment where someone is waiting. For each, write who is waiting, for what, how long before it costs you, and what the system can see.
Hold the audit against the triggers. Reply to any enquiry within the hour; send the signed insurance and safety pack the moment it’s asked for, from the store, never from someone’s inbox.
Group the triggers into flows, each starting on one event and ending with a person, a document or a decision. Kestrel’s 11 triggers became eight flows.
Brief every flow and every step: when it starts, when it must never fire, who it touches, the off switch, and what sends it to a human.
Check documents come from the store with expiry dates that stop the flow, and every reply but a yes reaches a named person within a day.
Measure time from enquiry to reply, days from verbal yes to signature, reviews that start on the agreed date, and flows that misfired this month.
From the finished example
The week-zero flow. The book writes it in full; this is how it opens.
The trigger: the deal moves to “start date set”, with a date at least 10 working days away. It does not fire if the contract is unsigned, or if the start is in less than five days: the partner calls instead.
Kestrel, its clients and its people are invented.
The template
The measures
Common mistakes
The habit of trusting what a system did because a system did it. A flow that ran isn’t a buyer who was served. Read the handovers.
The Loop for this build
Each quarter the Loop reads the flow log beside the deal moments and asks: did the people who were waiting stop waiting, and did the moments after them hold? A flow that completes while its stage doesn’t move is on time but not answering.
You should be, a little. One firm: nine systems, 11 triggers, eight flows, each with a brief, a brief for every step, an owner, an off switch and a heartbeat, and a log that has to be read every month, because automation fails quietly. That’s why the method runs in software.
Do it in RocMode for Agencies
What stays yours: Deciding what must stay human, and reading the handovers.