Start a conversation.

If you have them, these three things make the first conversation twice as productive:

• Roughly how often the problem happens — per day, per week, per order. Volume decides whether automation pays for itself.
• Who does it today and how long it takes them. That number is the benchmark everything gets measured against.
• What breaking looks like. A wrong answer that annoys someone is a different engineering problem from a wrong answer that costs money.

You do not need a specification, a budget range or a technology preference. If you already have those, bring them, but their absence is not a reason to wait.

That last one matters. A real share of the enquiries we receive are better served by configuring something off the shelf than by anything we would build, and we say so on the first call rather than after a paid discovery phase. It costs us the project and tends to earn the referral.

If it is worth building, you get a written summary within a few working days: the problem as we understood it, the approach we would take, the phases, and what each one costs. No obligation attached to any of it.

We are a small senior team, so enquiries are read by someone who could actually do the work rather than routed through a sales desk. The trade-off is that we are slower than a firm with a dedicated inbound team, and during a heavy delivery week a first reply can slip to two days. If something is genuinely urgent, say so in the subject line.