Business systems for owner-led businesses ยท Mebane, North Carolina

Professional meddler in tedious tasks and tangled tools.

Alderwork is a business systems studio for owner-led businesses. I get the tools you already pay for working together and automate the parts you dread. When there's no tool that does the job, I build a small one.

Tell me what's tangled How it works

The usual five: scheduling, email, payments, membership, the website.

Sound familiar?

Monday, 8:10

A new customer signs up and you type their details into four places. Then you type them again when something changes.

Every week

You send the same reminders by hand, then chase the ones who don't answer. It takes an hour you never get back.

Still, somehow

The scheduling tool and the invoicing tool have never met. You are the bridge, and the bridge is copy and paste.

That's the tangle. It's rarely one big problem. It's five ordinary tools and a lot of small hand-offs that nobody chose on purpose.

What I do

The repetitive stuff

Reminders, follow-ups, hand-offs, copy and paste. The things that eat your week, set up to run without you. That includes AI where it's actually useful.

Tools that don't talk to each other

Scheduling, email, payments, membership and your website, connected so you only have to update a customer's details once.

Steps that shouldn't exist

Before I automate anything I look at whether the step needs to be there at all. Sometimes the fix is just fewer steps.

Nothing off the shelf fits

Small apps and dashboards for the jobs that don't fit in a spreadsheet or in anything you can buy.

How it works

  1. A look under the hood

    I get into your tools and see how it all actually works. Small things I find along the way, I just fix.

  2. A plan you can price

    A written plan in priority order, with a fixed price on each item. You pick what's worth doing before I build anything.

  3. Built and handed over

    I build it, show you it works, and hand it over with plain instructions. If you'd rather I stay on and handle whatever comes up next, there's a monthly retainer for that.

Why alder

The tree that goes in first, and the wood that holds things up without asking for attention.

Alder is the tree that goes in first. It grows in wet, poor ground where not much else will, and it puts nitrogen back into the soil, so whatever comes after it grows better.

The wood is plain and it holds up. Workbenches and tool handles are made of it, so are a lot of electric guitars, and it gets harder under water. A lot of Venice is standing on alder pilings.

That's the idea behind the name. I'd like to be that for a business: make the ground good, then hold things up without needing much attention.

Is this for you?

Probably, if

  • You run the business yourself and you know exactly where the time goes.
  • You already pay for a handful of tools and want them to behave.
  • You'd rather fix a process than buy another subscription.

Probably not, if

  • You need an IT department. I'm one person, and I like it that way.
  • You want a big platform swapped out by a hard date.
  • You're looking for marketing. I make the back office quieter, not louder.

Start with an email

Tell me what's tedious or tangled in your business. A few sentences is plenty. I'll get back to you within two business days.