A real AI consultant,
for Manchester businesses.

You have probably been pitched at more than most

Manchester has one of the biggest agency and creative sectors in the country. Media City sits across the water in Salford, the Northern Quarter is full of studios, and there are more people selling marketing and digital services per square mile here than almost anywhere outside London.

That is good for the city and quietly bad for a small business owner in it, because it means you have been pitched at relentlessly. Retainers. Discovery phases. Strategy decks. Somebody who was very confident on a call and then handed the work to a junior you never met.

So I will not do the pitch. Here is what I think is actually true. Most Manchester businesses I speak to do not need a strategy. They already know what is broken. They know exactly which job eats their Tuesday. What they have never had is somebody who will sit down and build the thing that fixes it, then still be there in three months to check it worked.

What I would actually build for a Manchester business

Specifics matter more than the label, so here is what this looks like across the businesses Greater Manchester is actually made of.

A small agency or studio. New enquiries arrive through the site and half of them are not a fit, but you find that out forty minutes into a call. The fix asks the qualifying questions up front, in your tone rather than a form, writes up what it learns, and puts a short brief in front of you before you commit any time. The bad fits screen themselves out and the good ones arrive warm.

A bar, kitchen or venue. Bookings, function enquiries and supplier messages all land in different places, and the function enquiries are the valuable ones. The fix catches everything in one place, answers the standard questions immediately, capacity, dietary, whether the back room is free on the fifteenth, and flags the ones worth real money so they never sit unanswered overnight.

A trade or contractor across Stockport, Salford or Altrincham. You quote in the evenings because that is the only time it is quiet, and the slow quote loses to the fast one. The fix builds the quote from the job details you already gather, in your format and your prices, so it goes out the same day the work is measured.

A professional firm in the centre. The same onboarding admin happens for every new client, documents chased, details rekeyed, the same five emails written slightly differently each time. The fix does it identically every time and only involves a person when something is genuinely unusual.

None of this is impressive to look at. That is rather the point. It is the ordinary work that quietly costs you a day a week.

What this should cost, and what an agency would charge you

A simple automated workflow is £500 to £2,000. A custom AI tool built around one bottleneck is £2,500 to £8,000, and a system connecting several parts of the business is more. The software it runs on is normally tens of pounds a month and I will show you that figure before we start.

What you will often be quoted instead is a monthly retainer, agreed before anyone has told you what will actually be built. That arrangement is excellent for the agency and rarely for you, because it separates the money from the delivery. The fee arrives every month whether or not anything shipped.

The question that sorts this out quickly is simple. Ask what you will own at the end. If the answer is a document, a dashboard, or continued access to their team, you are not buying a tool. You are renting a relationship.

How the work actually runs

First there is a conversation, and it costs nothing. I want to hear how the week actually goes, not the tidy version. The useful detail is almost always in the bit somebody apologises for.

Then I tell you honestly whether there is something worth building. Sometimes there is not, and I would rather say so. If a job costs you an hour a month, automating it saves twelve hours a year and will not pay for itself.

If there is, I build it, you use it while it is being built rather than at the end, and it gets changed as we go because the first version is never quite right. Then I stay involved long enough to know whether it actually changed anything, because a tool that gets quietly abandoned in week three was a waste of your money whatever it cost.

You deal with me the whole way through. There is no account manager, no team you never meet, and nobody two years into their career doing the work while somebody senior sold it to you.