Most of the work in your business could be done by a machine.
The hard part is knowing which parts should not be.
Spine is a method for making that decision one step at a time, writing down the reasoning, and keeping a record that shows the line is still being held a year later.
A trade business, at three sizes, classified
Here is a plumbing company. Thirteen steps carry every job from the first phone call to getting paid — and back, because the review at the end is what the business learns from. Change its size. Then ask the method what a machine may do.
It starts with what is honest
Your customers are already telling you what is wrong. Reviews, jobs that came back, quotes that never converted. Most businesses read that and let it evaporate. The first thing we do is catch it, so it can be counted rather than skimmed.
Then the line gets drawn
Every step gets one of four answers, decided the same way every time. Two of the questions are asked of other people rather than of you — whether your customers mind a machine doing it, and whether the person doing it wants it taken away. Neither gets guessed.
And it keeps being checked
Every time a person overrides the machine, that gets logged. A boundary nobody examines is a boundary that has quietly moved. The log is how you find out before your customers do.
Ninety days, and one thing you can check yourself
At the end of it, you leave for ten working days and the business does not notice. Not “reachable but relaxed” — gone, with every contact written down, because each one is a finding.
Most automation work is sold on hours saved and costs cut. Those numbers are nearly impossible to verify afterwards, which is why they get promised so freely. Ten days away is different. Either the phone stayed quiet or it did not, and you will know by the second week.
Read what the ninety days involvesWhat you keep
- Your customer feedback, captured and searchable.
- A written map of how the business actually delivers.
- A decision for every step about what a machine may do, with a name against each one.
- Three automations running, each with a log of every time a person overrode it.
Yours whether or not you ever work with anyone again.
When this is the wrong thing to buy
If you do not actually want to be removable. Some owners are the bottleneck and are content there. That is a legitimate way to run a business, and every step of this asks you to hand something over.
If nothing honest is coming in. No feedback anywhere means there is nothing to build on. Starting to collect it is a smaller job, and the right one.
If you personally do nearly every step that earns money. Then there is nothing to document without you and ninety days is not enough. That usually means hiring before systemising.
Nobody has run this yet
The method is built, written down, and tested against its own worked examples. It has not been run end to end with a client. Saying so here rather than letting you find out later is the same discipline the method itself runs on — and the ten-day test is your protection: a result you can verify yourself rather than a claim you have to take on trust.
More about what is and is not true today