Example conversations with Ask Anything
Before briefing
You
Can I afford to take on another engineer?
Ask Anything
That depends on several factors: your current revenue and margin, how much work you are turning away, the total cost of employment including national insurance and pension, and how quickly a new hire becomes productive.
Could you tell me more about your business?
Could you tell me more about your business?
It has to ask, because it knows nothing.
After a ten-minute brief
You
Can I afford to take on another engineer?
Ask Anything
Probably, and the constraint is not the money.
You are at about £9,400 a month with two engineers, turning away roughly two jobs a week. A third engineer at £280 a day costs you around £4,900 a month all in once you add employers national insurance, pension and holiday.
Two jobs a week at your average of £2,400 is about £8,000 a month of work you are currently refusing. So the maths works with room to spare.
The real question is whether that work is steady. You told GRACE the turned-away jobs cluster around March to September. A permanent hire against seasonal demand is how businesses end up carrying someone through a quiet January.
Want MAYA to model it as a permanent hire against a subcontractor?
You are at about £9,400 a month with two engineers, turning away roughly two jobs a week. A third engineer at £280 a day costs you around £4,900 a month all in once you add employers national insurance, pension and holiday.
Two jobs a week at your average of £2,400 is about £8,000 a month of work you are currently refusing. So the maths works with room to spare.
The real question is whether that work is steady. You told GRACE the turned-away jobs cluster around March to September. A permanent hire against seasonal demand is how businesses end up carrying someone through a quiet January.
Want MAYA to model it as a permanent hire against a subcontractor?
Same question. It knows your revenue, your turned-away work and your seasonality, because you told it once.
Paste this to ALEX and fill it in
Here is my business so the whole team knows it. What we sell and roughly what we charge: How many people work here, employed or subcontracted: Where we operate: How we get customers today: The one thing currently going wrong: What I want the business to look like in a year:
AvoidRe-explaining the business at the top of every conversation.
Do this insteadTen minutes once, then never again.
Every answer afterwards starts from your actual situation instead of a generic small business.
Try it on your business
Every lesson ends with a question to hand to a Greymill specialist, who answers with what it knows about your business.