We Read Their Job Posts Before the Sales Call
Our ops audits start before we talk to anyone. A prospect fills out the form, gives us their website URL, and we do research. By the time the call happens, we already have a working draft with specific workflows, hour ranges, and dollar estimates. We're not pitching automation in the abstract. We're walking through their actual operation.
The research uses four public sources. The audit JSON documents which ones we used.
The Website
The website tells you what the business chose not to automate. A contact form that says "we'll get back to you" means someone has to remember to follow up every quote. An "online booking" button that links to a phone number means scheduling still runs through a human. A services page that lists everything they do with no pricing means every job starts with a manual conversation.
None of this is bad. But each one is a workflow, and every workflow has an hourly cost.
Job Postings
Job posts are a business's pain documented in public. When a residential service company posts for an "office coordinator" and describes the role as managing scheduling, following up with customers, and handling incoming calls, they're telling you that the coordination overhead has grown past what the current team can absorb. They wrote it down and posted it publicly. You can read it.
That's the sentence in the sample fixture: "recent job posts mention an office coordinator role, usually a sign the manual coordination load is growing." The phrase "usually a sign" is doing real work. You're making an inference, not a fact. But it's an informed one.
Google Reviews
Reviews surface where the experience actually breaks down. Patterns like "hard to get on the schedule," "had to call three times to confirm," or "would have given five stars but the booking process was a mess" are customers describing manual workflows from the outside. They don't know that scheduling runs through a phone queue. They just know it took effort. The review is the symptom; the workflow is the cause.
The Assumption Field
Every workflow estimate in the audit has a required assumption field. The TypeScript type enforces it. You can't compile without writing out what you assumed.
For the HVAC example, it reads: "Assumes ~20 quotes/mo at 15–20 min of follow-up each, $25/hr admin cost." That number came from the observation about their website form plus industry norms for residential service volume. If the business owner looks at that and says their actual quote volume is closer to 50 per month, the estimate adjusts up. That's the conversation we want to have.
Showing your work matters more than having the exact right number. A prospect who sees that you derived a specific range from specific reasoning is in a different headspace than one who heard "you could save a lot of time." The first framing invites a correction. The second invites a shrug.
Why This Works
Pre-research changes the call. Instead of asking broad questions about what keeps them busy, we're asking narrow ones. "Your website has a quote form but no automated follow-up sequence. How many quotes do you send a week?" That question is answerable. It leads somewhere.
The research takes an hour or two per prospect. The sources are all public. None of it requires a discovery call to access. It just requires looking.