Running a small business back office on AI

July 2026

At You Can Sauna I built the systems that do what a back office normally does. Site management, monitoring that catches a short delivery before it becomes a problem, invoicing straight into the accounts, customer and press comms. They saved us enough that the support hire we'd budgeted for never happened.

The software was the easy part. What mattered was changing how the business is put together. I used those systems to give each site's host real ownership of their site and take out a layer of middle management. That is what makes a small site pay. The overhead of running a small site does not shrink with the site, which is why other operators have given up on them. Pushing ownership down and automating the coordination is what changes the numbers.

Why did it work for me and not for them? Because I understood the business end to end first, then changed things on purpose. Most small firms bolt software onto a process built for people doing it by hand, then wonder why nothing improves. You have to redesign the work first, then automate the new version. Automating the old process just makes the same mess faster.

A small business has one advantage over a big one. You can see all of it, so you can rebuild it. The hard part is working out which steps earn their keep and which only survive out of habit.

I built this for my own company and designed myself out of the day to day. I help other small businesses do the same.

Putting AI to work in a small business. me@yussefrobinson.uk