Owners tell me they'd love to automate a piece of the business, but they'd need a technical spec first, and nobody on the team writes those.
Good news: you already wrote it. You wrote it the last time you texted someone how to do the job.
Three lines is the whole spec
If you can text a new hire three plain sentences, a builder can turn it into a working system:
- What starts it. A form comes in. A job closes. It hits Friday at 4.
- What happens, in order. Where the info goes, who gets told, what gets sent.
- What finished looks like. The lead is in the CRM, the reply went out, the sheet shows the number.
That's it. No flowchart, no requirements doc, no software vocabulary. Three sentences a sixth-grader could follow.
Plain sentences build fine
Here's a real one, word for word from an owner: *"When a quote gets accepted, put the customer on the schedule, text them the date, and send me a note so I know it's booked."*
Twenty-eight words. That built a workflow that now runs every time, all by itself, and the owner stopped being the person who remembers.
The reason this works is that the hard part of automation was never the code. The hard part is deciding exactly what should happen — and you're the only one who can decide that. You've been making that call in your head all along. Writing it down is the whole handoff.
Try it this week
Pick one thing you did more than three times last week. Open your phone, and text it to yourself in three lines: what starts it, what happens, what done looks like.
Read it back. If a new hire could follow it, it's ready to build.
Clear beats clever. A process you can say out loud is a process a machine can run.
Bring those three lines to a conversation and you'll leave with a build plan instead of a wish list. That's a good trade for two minutes of typing.