Wānaka · Central Otago · Aotearoa NZ
Usually it's three or four things half working at once. The website, the CRM, the email setup, and nobody looking at all of them together. I do the looking, then I fix it.
How it starts
What people ring about, and what it turns out to be.
Real jobs, anonymised. In almost none of them was the problem the thing I got called about.
Membership organisation
“Can we get AI working here?”
What it was
AIThe AI was never the problem. It couldn't see any of the information the business runs on, so it could only ever give generic answers. Connecting it up was the work. Teaching people to use it took an afternoon.
Tourism operator
“Our enquiries have dried up.”
What it was
WebsitesThe contact form had been broken since an update and failing without a sound. Six weeks of enquiries never arrived. Traffic was fine the entire time.
Professional services
“We need a CRM.”
What it was
SystemsThey already had one, and it was empty. What they needed was three people to stop keeping their own lists.
Trades business
“Can you make our quotes faster?”
What it was
OperationsWriting a quote took twenty minutes. Getting it approved took nine days. The slow part was not the part anyone was looking at.
Hospitality group
“Our emails keep going to spam.”
What it was
ITDNS records still pointing at a mail provider they had left years earlier. Twenty minutes to fix, once someone looked.
Retail and wholesale
“Someone leaves on Friday and nobody knows what they can get into.”
What it was
AdminEleven accounts across five systems, two of them paid for and forgotten. Now there's a list, and leaving takes fifteen minutes.
What's going on
Notice what none of those were.
Every one came in as a single obvious thing. A form, a CRM, a quote, an email setup. In each case the fault sat one step to the side of where anyone was looking.
The web person owns the form. The IT company owns the mail records. Someone's nephew owns the spreadsheet. All of them are doing their bit correctly, and the business still doesn't work, because the fault is in the join and the join is nobody's.
So that's the bit I do.
Fifteen joins between six things. Every one of them is somebody's blind spot.
What people call about
Six things. Mostly the same problem.
You don't pick one off a menu. Whatever you ring about, I'll look at what it's attached to.
Where this is going
Most people selling you AI have never seen your systems.
An assistant that can't reach your calendar, your files or your customer records is a party trick. It writes confident paragraphs about a business it knows nothing about, everyone tries it twice, and the subscription renews for a year without anyone noticing.
Connected, it stops being something you go and ask. It runs to a schedule. The weekend's enquiries are sorted and drafted before you're in on Monday. The background on the company you're meeting Thursday is already written up. The research no one had a spare afternoon for is done by the time anyone needs it.
None of that happens without the plumbing. Getting it to see the right things, and only the right things, is systems work, and it's the part most AI people skip.
- Connect it to your actual work
- Mail, calendar, files, CRM, project tracker. It can only work with what it can see.
- Set it running out of hours
- Research, drafts, summaries, prep. Scheduled overnight, so it's sitting there before anyone's in.
- Teach the team to drive it
- An afternoon, in their own tools, on their own jobs. Most of the value is people knowing what to ask.
- Say no where it doesn't pay
- Plenty of jobs are better solved by fixing the process. You'll be told when that's the case.
While nobody was there
6 of 6 done
- 17:42You left for the day.
- 19:20Enquiry came in through the website. Logged against the right account, nobody retyped it.
- 22:05The weekend's inbox read and sorted. Six need you. Fourteen don't.
- 01:30Replies written for the fourteen, sitting in drafts for you to send or bin.
- 03:45Thursday's meeting written up. The company, who you're seeing, and the last three jobs you did for them.
- 05:10The quotes nobody had chased. Follow-ups drafted against each one.
- 07:55You got in.
An example of the shape, not a record of a job. What it can actually do depends entirely on what it can reach, which is the part further up this page.
Platforms
You won't have to explain your stack to me.
I administer most of these day to day, not just advise on them. Which ones you run matters far less than whether they talk to each other.
CRM and sales
- HubSpot
- Salesforce
- Pipedrive
- and the rest
Projects and operations
- Asana
- Monday.com
- Airtable
- Notion
- Trello
Workspace and identity
- Google Workspace
- Microsoft 365
- accounts
- permissions
AI
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Copilot
- custom agents
What it costs
Published, because you shouldn't have to ask.
Advice is hourly, at about what your accountant charges. Anything built is scoped and quoted first, because the value of a system that saves your team a day a week has very little to do with how many hours it took me. Working out whether there's a job here costs nothing, because that part is just a conversation.
No vendor commissions, ever. If I recommend a platform it's because it's right, not because it pays a margin.
Advice by the hour
$300
per hour
Second opinions, reviews, troubleshooting. Most valuable right before you spend real money.
AI integration
Fixed scope
assessment, build, handover
Connected to your systems, running the jobs nobody gets to, and your team trained to drive it. Priced on the job, not the hours, and quoted after a short assessment so the number is real.
A defined project
Fixed quote
agreed before it starts
You see the number before I begin. Scope changes get quoted, not swallowed.
Ongoing support
Monthly
scoped to the business
Someone who already knows your setup and answers the phone. Things get fixed while they're still small.
20yrs
Across software, sales and operations
1
Person accountable for all of it
0
Commissions taken from any vendor
Recent work
Three you can open right now.
Most of the work never reaches a portfolio. It is internal, it is under NDA, or it is the conversation that stopped someone buying the wrong thing.
I'm Daniel. I run Paper Rocket on my own from Wānaka, and I have been doing this sort of work for about twenty years.
You get me on the phone, and me doing the work. No account manager, no handover to someone junior.
Where I work
Most of my clients are half an hour away.
Based in Wānaka, working across Central Otago, and remotely with businesses everywhere else in New Zealand. If you are nearby I would rather come and sit in your office for an hour than do this over email, because half of what I need to see is on someone's screen.
- Wānaka
- Queenstown
- Cromwell
- Hāwea
- Arrowtown
- Alexandra
Further afield, it all works remotely. A good chunk of the work always has.
Next
Tell me what's going on.
Ring me, or send a rough description of the problem. If I'm not the right person for it, you'll get told that and a name to try instead.