About Level One: the systems bigger companies have, without the overheads

Level One gives small and mid-sized UK businesses the kind of systems larger companies rely on: enquiries answered in seconds, paperwork that files itself, and marketing that can be measured. The business is run from Edinburgh by Dean Finlayson.

Every service is sold the same way. There's a fixed build fee, agreed in writing, then a monthly plan that keeps the system running, monitored and improving. The client owns what's built.

Level One offers four services. Each has its own page with the full detail.

Most small businesses run on one or two people who answer the phone, reply to enquiries, type up orders, chase invoices and still try to do the actual work. When they're busy, things slip.

• Enquiries go cold. A call goes to voicemail, a web form waits until the next morning, an ad lead never gets a reply. Research published in Harvard Business Review in 2011 found that firms contacting a lead within an hour were nearly 7 times more likely to have a qualifying conversation than firms that waited an hour longer. The average response among firms that replied at all was 42 hours.
• Paperwork eats the week. The same order, invoice or delivery note is typed into two or three systems, and reports are built by hand every Monday.
• Marketing can't be measured. The website is old or slow, ads run without anyone knowing what they return, and the business doesn't appear when buyers search or ask an assistant for a recommendation.

The usual fixes fall short. Another hire costs £24,000 to £35,000 or more a year and only covers office hours. Off-the-shelf apps need someone to set them up and keep them talking to each other. Large agencies hand the work to a junior team. Level One builds the system once, connects it to what the business already uses, and stays on to run it.

One person takes each project from the first call to handover, and stays on afterwards. See the process on the home page.

• Systems Review. A 90-minute working session on how enquiries, orders and paperwork move through the business today, followed by a written plan with costs.
• Fixed quote. Scope, what you'll receive, timeline and price agreed in writing before anything is built.
• Build in stages. The first piece goes live early, so you see it working within weeks.
• Test with real data. Every system is checked against your own past enquiries, documents and questions before launch.
• Launch and handover. A plain-English runbook explains every part and what to do when something is flagged.
• Monthly plan. Monitoring, fixes, updates as the business changes, a regular report in numbers you can check, and one improvement each month.

Running costs such as call minutes, text messages or ad spend are billed at cost, listed on the monthly invoice and kept within a monthly cap agreed up front.

• The person you speak to is the person who builds it. Nothing is passed to a junior or an outsourcer.
• Every project has a fixed quote in writing, agreed before work starts.
• You see something working within weeks, because the build is delivered in stages.
• You own it. Accounts, data and workflows are set up in your name, and you keep everything if you stop the monthly plan.
• If something isn't worth automating, you'll hear that on the first call.

Level One works with owner-led businesses across the UK, from its base in Edinburgh. It's most useful when one or more of these sounds familiar:

• Calls go to voicemail and web enquiries wait until the next day.
• Quotes go out and nobody chases them.
• The same questions get answered by hand every day.
• Orders and invoices are typed into more than one system.
• Nobody knows which ads bring in work.

Level One only publishes what can be checked, and this section will grow as client work is published with permission.

• How we work: a written fixed quote before any build, a build delivered in stages, and testing against your own data before launch.
• Ownership: accounts, data and workflows set up in your name from the start.
• Data: kept in accounts you own, with access limited to what each system needs, under UK GDPR. See the privacy policy.