Manual work belongs to the systems, decisions to people.
Reading enquiries, matching them against the CRM, filling in what is missing, moving them into the next system, passing them on: the same steps, every day. I build the systems that take that over. Up to the point where someone has to judge.
Automation and AI
Reading, transferring, matching, completing, reshaping, forwarding. Whatever happens by hand between two screens today runs on its own afterwards. Orchestration with n8n, connecting CRM and operational systems through their APIs, enrichment and classification with language models where rigid rules fall short.
Backends and internal tools
Interfaces, data models and small internal applications for the things no off-the-shelf software covers, the things that currently live in a spreadsheet.
Websites
When the site is part of the sales path, I build that too: fast, maintainable and connected to the same systems as everything else.
01 — The current state
What the manual work costs today
Three inputs are enough. The calculator quantifies one thing only: what the manual process ties up in your company each year. No promised savings, no percentage, no industry figure from me. Just your own numbers, multiplied.
Time spent reading, transferring, checking, completing, correcting and forwarding.
Everyone who does the same process by hand on a regular basis.
Employer cost including overhead, not the gross salary.
Working time tied up, in money
€60,720
per year
That is 1,104 working hours a year
Calculated as hours × people × 46 working weeks × hourly cost. 46 weeks, because holidays and public holidays are deducted.
The figure says nothing about how much of it can be automated. That can only be judged after looking at the actual process, which is exactly what the first call is for.
02 — One process in detail
What “automated” actually means
An example you can play through. A customer enquiry arrives by email. Today someone reads it, pulls out the details, checks whether the company is already a customer, fills in what the email leaves out, types it all into the CRM and creates a task. A few minutes, every time. Below, the same case runs as a chain. Click through the steps: on the right you see what exists in the system after each one.
Example: an enquiry in the shared inbox
Sample data. Not a real customer record.
Step 01 — Intake
The enquiry arrives
An email in the shared inbox, a form submission, a webhook from the shop. The trigger is interchangeable; everything behind it stays the same.
Incoming
- Sender
- m.brenner@harkort-guss.de
- Subject
- Enquiry: repeat order, bearing covers
- Received
- 07:41
The same chain applies to anything that today consists of reading, transferring and forwarding: orders, incoming invoices, complaints, job applications. The trigger changes, the principle does not.
03 — An illustrative engagement
What a typical project looks like
So it is clear what we would be talking about. The case below is constructed for illustration only. It does not describe an existing engagement.
01
Starting point
Enquiries arrive through four channels: a shared inbox, a contact form, trade fair contacts and phone notes. Three people in inside sales transfer them into the CRM, check whether the customer already exists and create tasks. Work often starts the following day, and nobody can say reliably how many enquiries are left waiting.
02
What gets built
A chain that brings all four channels into one format, reads the fields out of the prose, matches them against the CRM and creates the record there. Plus a small internal overview showing what came in, what was assigned and what is waiting for a decision. Exceptions deliberately do not pass through automatically; they go to a review list.
03
What is different afterwards
Inside sales reviews instead of transferring. Every enquiry is recorded the moment it arrives and has an owner. The overview answers the question about the backlog without anyone having to ask. What used to depend on individual people now depends on a process you can look at and change.
04 — Working together
How a project runs
No framework agreement, no lock-in. Everything runs on your accounts and your instances, so you can keep it running without me at any point.
01
First call
You describe the process, I tell you whether it is worth it. If it is not, I say so: a process that costs ten minutes twice a month should not be automated.
- Time frame
- 30 to 45 minutes, free
- What I need from you
- Someone who actually does the process daily, not just the description of it.
02
Discovery
I watch the process, review the systems and access involved and write down which data flows where. The result is a proposal with a fixed scope and a fixed price, not an open-ended day rate.
- Time frame
- two to five days
- What I need from you
- Access to test systems, one point of contact and permission to look at real examples.
03
Build
In stages. After each stage there is something running that you can try out, not only at the end. Changes to the scope are normal and are discussed before they are built.
- Time frame
- usually two to six weeks
- What I need from you
- Half an hour a week for questions and one test run with real cases.
04
Handover
Documentation, a walkthrough for the people who work with it and one for IT. After that, either I look after it or you run it yourselves. Both are provided for; neither is a condition.
- Time frame
- one to two days
- What I need from you
- Two appointments and a decision on who owns the process from then on.
05 — About me
Who builds this
I am Noah Guthart, I work out of Munich, and I build software that takes work away rather than creating more of it. My standard is that a process does not just run after handover but stays understandable: changeable in one place, properly documented and not dependent on me. In practice that means orchestration with n8n, interfaces to CRM and operational systems through their APIs, and language models where rigid rules fall short. Alongside that, the restraint to leave them out where they add nothing.
Before I built processes, I advised on them: eighteen months in management consulting at Accenture in financial services. Hence the conviction I start from: the technology is rarely the problem. The problem is usually that nobody ever wrote the process down in full. So every project starts by watching, not by picking a tool.
Contact
Tell me what runs by hand at your company
One email is enough, two sentences will do. I reply within one working day and tell you in the first call whether the effort pays off.
Your calculator says €60,720 a year.
If no mail client is set up: copy the address.