00 The agents
The people you would hire if hiring were free.
Not one assistant trying to be good at everything. A general manager that holds the whole loop, and underneath it the specialists a particular job actually needs, each with a playbook written in steps you can read.
01 The general manager
One thing to talk to.
The general manager is the one that notices. It holds the loop rather than a job inside it, which is why it can tell that a quiet proposal matters more today than a tidy administrative task also sitting in the queue.
It is also the only one allowed to bring you a question. A specialist that gets stuck goes back to the general manager, and the general manager decides whether that is something to resolve or something only you can settle.
You never assign work to a bot.
Say what you want the way you would say it to a person who works for you. Which specialists it takes, in what order, and what has to finish before the next thing starts is the general manager's problem, not yours. If a job needs three of them, you will not know that unless you go and look at the trace.
02 The specialists
A specialist for every job on your desk.
These are the shapes rather than a catalogue. What is actually on your team depends on what your business does, and it is proposed to you at setup rather than picked off a list.
The one that chases
Sweeps for what went quiet. Proposals with no reply, leads that never got booked, customers nobody has spoken to since the work finished. Drafts the note, ranks it, hands it up.
The one that researches
Goes and reads the company before you meet them. Their own site, what they publish, what your records already say about them. Comes back with a brief rather than a link.
The one that writes
Quotes, scopes, replies, reports. As real documents in your template and your files, not as text in a chat window you then have to reformat.
The one that reads what comes in
Every ticket, message or form submission. Works out what it is and what it is about, writes that onto the record, and routes it before a person opens it.
The one that watches the numbers
Tracks the vitals of the business, notices which one is slipping, and proposes the single next move rather than a dashboard for you to interpret.
The one that checks the work
Re reads what the others produced and raises anything it is no longer confident about. The agent that exists because agents get things wrong.
03 The playbook
Open it and read exactly what it will do.
Every agent carries a playbook, and a playbook is plain steps in plain language. Not a prompt you are not allowed to see, not a flowchart, not a black box with a personality bolted on the front.
You can read where it stops. The step that says stage for approval is written down in the same list as the steps that say go and look something up, which means the boundary is a thing you can inspect rather than a promise on a marketing page.
And you can change it. If the way it writes a follow up is not how you would write one, the fix is editing a line in the playbook, not describing your preference again every time.
- Find quotes sent with no reply since
- Read the thread and the job it belongs to
- Skip anyone already booked in
- Draft a short note in the owner's voice
- Stage for approval. Do not send.
04 The one you are missing
Describe it the way you would describe the job.
Say what you need in the words you would use telling a new hire what the role is. Not a specification, not a workflow, not a list of triggers and conditions. The job.
It comes back with a proposal: what the role is, what it will actually do, which tools it wants access to, and the line it will not cross. You read that, change what is wrong, and decide whether it joins. It starts advisory like everything else does.
Executive expertise that executes.
Tell us the job nobody has time for.
The one that is genuinely somebody's job and genuinely never gets done. That is the right place to start, and it is a better conversation than a feature list.