An agent factory in a small firm: the loop around the job

An agent factory in a small service firm is not a faster way to fill in the same forms. It is the same road from enquiry to payment, closed into a loop where every stage leaves a record, and where a person stops carrying data around and starts deciding at a few points: approving the scope and price, confirming the work is done, and agreeing to what goes out to the customer.

Agents prepare everything in between. Copy the old way of working one for one, with an agent where the owner used to be, and you get more drafts, not a better firm.

This is the third piece in a series. The first argued that an agent factory will reach a firm with no IT department once its work is written down. The second, that what the loop learns should stay with the firm. This one is about what the loop looks like from the inside.

The old way in one paragraph

In a five-person service firm a job moves like a relay in which one person runs almost every leg. The owner takes the enquiry, drives out to measure, writes the quote at night, puts the date in the calendar, rings the wholesaler, raises the invoice after the work, and three weeks later remembers that somebody ought to chase it. Between each step there is retyping: from email to document, from document to calendar, from calendar to the invoicing program. Why that quote came out the way it did lives in one head. We wrote about that in The owner is the integration layer.

That model worked because there was no other. In an agent loop, preparation becomes the cheapest thing and a person’s attention the most expensive. That turns the order of the work around.

The loop in eight stages

Stage	What the agent prepares	Where a person decides
1. Intake	gathers enquiries from email, messages and phone notes into one queue
2. Triage	sorts them: ready to quote, missing information, unusual
3. Scope and quote	a draft scope and price based on similar past jobs, with its reasoning	approves the scope and price
4. Preparation	date, crew, materials, job sheet
5. Review	a second agent checks the draft against the price list, the customer’s history and the plan
6. Verification	sets photos and site notes against the approved scope	confirms the work is done
7. Release	the invoice, the sign-off sheet, the message to the customer	agrees to send
8. Monitoring	watches payment, prepares reminders, spots complaints and sends them back to intake

A coordinator sits above the loop. It is an agent that picks up every signal (a new email, a moved date, a photo from site, a payment landing in the account), works out which stage the job is at and starts the right step. A cheaper model is enough for sorting. A draft quote needs a stronger one.

One thing separates this loop from a software team’s: the agents do not do the work itself. A technician swaps the boiler. The agents prepare everything around it, so the technician does not have to ring the office and the office does not have to ring the technician.

1. Intake: the enquiry in one place

An enquiry that comes through six doors does not exist for the firm until somebody retypes it. Without one queue, some jobs live in a technician’s phone, and nobody can tell how many there were, how many were lost or how long the reply took.

2. Triage: the cheapest saving in the loop

The agent reads the enquiry and puts it in one of three bins. Ready to quote: what, where and when are clear. Missing information: the agent drafts a question to the customer, say for a photo of the boiler’s rating plate. Unusual: it goes to the owner, because it needs judgement. Without this stage a quote gets built from half the facts, and the other half turns up on site in front of the customer.

3. Scope and quote: where the quality of the whole loop is decided

The agent drafts the scope and price from similar jobs in the history and shows which ones. The owner reads it, corrects it and approves it. This is the point of greatest leverage. Fixing a sentence in the scope takes a minute. Finding the same gap on site costs an afternoon and some of the customer’s trust. Without this stage the owner reviews a finished invoice and tries to recall what was agreed. What a late quote costs is the subject of A good quote sent next week loses to a decent one sent tomorrow.

4. Preparation: the least glamorous stage

Date, crew, materials, a job sheet with the address and contact. Everyone wants to start here, because a schedule is visible straight away. But if intake, triage and scope are not working, a fast schedule just books jobs nobody described properly. A calendar also knows only about time, not who holds which ticket or what is in which van. More in Your calendar only knows about time.

5. Review: the stage that learns

Before a draft reaches a person, a second agent checks it against the price list, the customer’s history and the week’s plan. Is the price out of line with the last three similar jobs? Does the customer have an unpaid invoice? Does the date clash with another job for the same crew? A separate agent collects the owner’s corrections and from time to time proposes a change to the review rules. That proposal is an ordinary change for a person to approve. Without this stage the owner fixes the same five things every week.

6. Verification: confirming instead of investigating

After the work, the agent sets the photos, notes and materials used against the approved scope and shows the differences: an extra hour, an extra valve, a point that was not done. A person looks at the comparison and says “that’s right” or “explain”. Without it the invoice is written from memory, and extra work that nobody recorded drops off the bill.

7. Release: the decision stays with a person

The invoice, the sign-off sheet and the message to the customer are ready. A person sends them. This is where the risk moves from the firm to its relationship with the customer, and someone has to put their name to it. The agent prepares, checks and proposes. A person decides and answers for it. Why an invoice that never went out costs the most is covered in The unsent invoice is the most expensive thing in a small firm.

8. Monitoring: the loop closes

The agent watches the payment date, prepares reminders and recognises the messages that are really complaints. A complaint goes back to stage one as a new job, linked to the one it came from, as we described in A complaint is a job nobody priced. Without this stage the loop is a line that ends at the invoice, and the firm does not know what happens next.

The second loop: a loop that improves the loop

Above the flow of jobs runs a second, quieter loop. An observer agent scores each job: how many times a person corrected something, how many days passed between the end of the work and the invoice, whether the job came back as a complaint. From that it proposes changes to the loop itself: a sharper pricing rule for the old blocks, an earlier reminder for customers who always pay late.

For that to be safe, the rules have to be written down, versioned and reversible. Every change to the loop travels the same road as a draft for a customer: proposal, review, a person’s approval. A loop that rewrites its own rules will, within a quarter, be doing things nobody in the firm understands.

The old flow and the loop

Dimension	The old flow	The agent loop
Shape	a relay, run mostly by the owner	a loop: monitoring feeds new jobs
Where a person looks	at a finished document, late at night	at the scope before the work and the comparison after it
Scarcest resource	the owner’s time	the owner’s attention at a few decision points
Pricing knowledge	in one head and old emails	in rules and history, in the firm’s own database
Improving the way of working	when something goes badly wrong	on every job, as proposals to approve
Work in progress	in a phone and a notebook	visible to the whole firm in one queue
Who answers for what goes out	a person	still a person

The last row matters most. Price, scope, confirmation of the work and consent to send stay with people. Everything in between changes.

Where automation does harm

Jobs that only look simple. “Annual boiler service, same as every year” sounds like something to price without looking. Until the customer mentions in the third sentence that there has been a smell of gas for a week. Start where a mistake is cheap and visible at once: sorting enquiries, a draft invoice for a closed job, a payment reminder.

Skipping scope approval because the draft is quick. A quick draft without an approved scope is the most expensive way to discover, in front of the customer, that everybody understood the job differently.

Self-improvement without brakes. Changing the rules without a person’s approval is drift, not progress.

A loop instead of people. A crew told that the system is there to replace them will leave before the system works. The loop is there to take retyping and calls to the office off people’s plates, not the work itself.

How to tell the loop is working

Vanity metric	Outcome metric
number of drafts the agents prepared	how many times a person touched one job from enquiry to payment
number of emails read	time from enquiry to a sent quote
number of AI features in the subscription	time from the end of the work to a sent invoice
“the system handled a hundred jobs”	share of jobs that came back as a complaint

In software teams the four classic DORA measures play a similar role. In a service firm the right column is their equivalent, and it can only be counted once a job has a record.

The order to build it in

Each step should leave a working system. You can stop after any of them and still be ahead.

1. Intake and triage. One queue and three bins. Result: no enquiry gets lost, and questions about missing information go out the same day.
2. Draft scope and quote, with approval. Result: the quote goes out on the day of the visit, not a week later.
3. Invoice at close, and reminders. Result: finished work does not sit unbilled, and the reminder goes out on time.
4. Verification after the work. Result: extra work lands on the invoice instead of being forgotten.
5. Connect and measure. The coordinator links the stages, monitoring feeds intake, the observer scores the jobs. Only now does the second loop start to run.

BiznesIQ is being built in that order, on the same rule: anything that leaves the firm is a draft a person approves. For now we run our own jobs on it, not anyone else’s. What already works and what is still a plan is set out on the home page.

On Monday, do one thing: take your last twenty enquiries and, in a spreadsheet, put each one in one of the three bins. If more than half land in “missing information”, the first agent in your firm should not be the one that writes quotes. It should be the one that asks the customer the right question.

That leaves a decision. You can give yourself an assistant that writes quotes faster and keep retyping them into three programs at night. Or you can build a loop in which you stop carrying data and start approving the things that really need your judgement.