Ey-aye is a small Harrogate outfit that builds businesses and the systems behind them: the brand, the marketing, the back end, and now the bit where AI makes it all run. We'll come and look at how yours actually works, say what AI is worth doing and what it isn't, then build the bit that is. If the answer's nay, you've lost an hour and a brew.
Clinics, trades, shops, workshops, small manufacturers and professional services. Harrogate, Knaresborough, Ripon, Wetherby and anywhere within an hour's drive.
That's not your fault. The adverts don't help. Every other post on Facebook is a "does it all for you" system for £200 a month, and most of them are a thin wrapper round the same ChatGPT you could use yourself for a tenner.
Here's the honest order of things. Most businesses get the first big win from using the tools they already pay for properly. Some need those tools plugged into their own systems. A few need something built. We'll tell you which you are, and we won't sell you the third one if the first one does the job.
Four things, in this order. Most people stop after the second one, and that's fine. How it all fits together →
An hour at your place. We watch how the work actually flows, ask daft questions, and say where AI would save real time and where it would just be a toy. You get a one-page aye/nay list. No pitch.
About the look-round →Four hours at your place with Claude or ChatGPT and your own data: last month's bookings, the quotes you sent, the spreadsheet you dread. By the end you've built a dashboard or a report yourself, you know what to ask for, and you know what must never go into a public AI: where your data lives, what gets trained on, how to keep customer lists and your own IP out of it. No new subscription, no jargon, and you keep every prompt we write together.
About the half-day →One job, fixed price, four weeks. We take the biggest aye from the look-round and build it into the tools you already use: Wix, Shopify, Xero, QuickBooks, your booking system. You see it working every week, not at the end. You own it.
Already know what you need? For larger businesses opening their own software and systems to AI, we build bespoke MCP servers and the governance around them. Get in touch.
About the build →Keeping what we built running. Updates when your software changes, a check-in each month, and a real person on the end of the phone when something looks odd. Cancel whenever. Nothing breaks if you do.
About fed and watered →Your business already knows the answer to most questions. The trouble is the answer's split across five logins. Bookings in one place, invoices in another, the customer's last email somewhere else, the stock in a spreadsheet.
We join those up so an AI can see all of them at once, safely, read-only where it should be. Then you ask it like you'd ask a good office manager: "Who's in this week that still owes us?" "What did we quote the Smiths last time?" "Which lines haven't sold since spring?" Once that's in place, the automation builds on top of it: the morning brief, the quote that writes itself, the chase that goes out on Friday.
Nothing leaves your systems to be trained on. The AI reads what it's allowed to and no more, and every answer shows where it got it from. That's one of nine things on the full list of what we can build.
New or returning, last seen, what they booked, what they said on the intake form, where their package is up to. Read over the first brew. No typing, no digging through Wix. We launched the brand and built the booking system, so this was the obvious first job.
Read how it was built →Ey-aye is Paul Lofthouse. I've launched and run brands of my own. Bodyworks by Corey is the massage and lymphatic drainage practice in Harrogate that Corey founded: she's the therapist, and I launched the brand and run the bookings, the marketing and everything behind the front desk. Her name for the job is "back-end boy". Purple Helmet, the motorsport apparel brand, is mine end to end: brand, store, community, back end.
Underneath that I'm a software architect, thirty years in: engine control units, dynamometers, race-car data systems, and lately the software that lets AI talk to all of it. I've built with these models from the inside, not just typed into them, so I know what they're good at and where they bluff. My day job is with an automotive software company whose tools sit inside major car makers' engineering teams, and the biggest AI product I've shipped is theirs: an assistant that lets engineers ask their calibration platform questions in plain English. The same idea runs my own race-data system, which you can see.
So when I say something's worth doing, it's because I've had to make it pay in a business I own, not because it looked good in a slide deck. And if it's worth building, I build it myself.
Pick an hour and we'll come to you. If you'd rather talk first, the form reaches a person, not a bot.
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