Field notes
Articles
What we learn documenting real businesses — process costs, automation that pays for itself, and the builds along the way.
How much of it actually goes away
The savings side of the math, argued properly: why the estimate attaches to steps rather than totals, the 50% cap our own tool can't exceed, and the modeled renewals process worked line by line — plus why recovered hours aren't automatically recovered dollars.
A finished SOP, section by section
The interview gives you eleven fields of raw capture. This is what it has to become — eight sections, current state only, gaps marked rather than filled — and the three tests that tell you the document is done.
The process interview: questions that get you the real steps
Ask someone to describe their process and you get the official version. The questions that surface the actual one — the exceptions, the shadow spreadsheet, and the twenty minutes nobody counts.
Automation has a running cost. Price it before you build.
The maintenance floor, itemized: build amortized over a realistic life, software, upkeep labor, and the manual work that survives. A modeled renewals automation, priced honestly — 13-month payback, not a 90-day miracle.
Four tests for a real automation candidate
Asking a room what to automate surfaces the loudest annoyance, not the biggest cost. The four tests a process has to pass before it's worth automating — plus the candidates you should disqualify on sight.
You can't secure what you can't describe
The third reason to organize first: permissions attach to structure. Without a folder shape and names that mean something, least privilege, classification, and audit logs are all unwritable — for your staff, and now for your agents.
The filing rules, in enough detail to hand to someone
A follow-up on the five-step order from the last article: the actual naming convention — one reserved delimiter, a fixed field order — plus what a system-of-record decision and a retention rule look like written out.
Your AI project is a filing project
Automation triggers on structured data. AI reasons over unstructured data. Most businesses under 100 people have plenty of both and have organized neither — here's what "organized" has to mean before either one works.
Build log: turning interview notes into client-ready SOPs
How FIO's assessment studio drafts a structured SOP from raw interview capture — the pipeline, the guardrails, and why the founder still reviews every word.
What a $999 process assessment actually buys you
Not a sales call with homework: what's inside the four deliverables of a FIO assessment, why the fee credits toward build work, and who shouldn't buy it.
The real cost of "we just handle it in email"
Three ordinary back-office processes at a 24-person insurance agency, costed honestly: $51,940 a year in unpriced manual labor — and how to run the same math on your own operation.