Old Friend Automation
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Old Friend Automation

Less time on the busywork.
More time on the good part.

I build simple systems that quietly handle the repetitive admin for people who buy and sell. Listing, stock, pricing, orders, reports. Whether you run a shop or work from a spare room.

Tell me what's eating your time →

I buy and sell second-hand myself, so I know this world's graft first-hand: photographing stock, listing it everywhere, the double-selling, the "what's it actually worth" guesswork. Truth be told, that's how this started. I got so carried away building the tools to make my own shop run smoother that I started building them for other people too. Shops, dealers, collectors, market traders, anyone who'd rather be finding good things and selling them than moving data between tabs at midnight. No jargon, no big software project. Usually working in days.

What I can set up for you

List once, sell everywhere
Post a piece once and it goes out across every channel you sell on: eBay, Etsy, Shopify, your own site. The watch, the jacket, the chair, listed once instead of five times, and marked sold everywhere the moment it goes so you never double-sell.
Know what it's worth
A clear read on what your stock actually sells for, whether it's a first edition or a mid-century lamp, so you price to sell without leaving money on the table. Guesswork gone.
The back-office, automated
Stock, orders, photos, customer details and reports, all kept in sync across your tools, so the admin that eats your evenings just runs itself.
Whatever's eating your week
The repetitive job you dread. Chasing, reporting, stock-taking, moving the same information from one place to another... there's usually a way to automate it. Tell me what yours is and I'll tell you honestly if I can help.

Most jobs start with a quick win from £150. Fuller builds run £500 to £900. Fixed prices, no surprises.

Keep working your way

You don't have to change how you work. If you love the sourcing, the hunt, the chatting to customers, the eye for a good piece, keep all of it. That's the business. I just take the repetitive bits off your plate: the stock-taking, the re-listing, the where-did-that-order-go, the customer details that live in three different places. So the parts you got into this for get more of your day, and the parts you dread get less.

Recent work

Nothing here is a mock-up. These are systems I've built and run for my own businesses, most of them daily. Where you see data, it's sample data. The systems are real.

The morning digestrunning daily
Every morning at 6am, a market intelligence report lands in my inbox: stock movements, market signals and editorial coverage, pulled from twelve sources and read by AI before I've had coffee. I built it to run my own archive business. It hasn't missed a morning.
The 6am morning digest email, as it arrives
The 6am digest, as it lands.
The pricing reportrunning weekly
Once a week, every item in my inventory is checked against the current market and handed a verdict: priced right, price up, or price down. The suggested prices are written straight into my stock system for review. No spreadsheets, no guesswork.
The weekly pricing report with its verdicts
The weekly verdicts, written into the inventory. Sample items.
The publish-once pipelinerunning
One product record in my database becomes a live shop listing. Photos attached, formatted, published, and not a word retyped.
A database record and the live shop listing it became
One record in, one live listing out.
The Fieldworking prototype
A buyer-side car market tool. Tell it what you're after, say a Porsche 997.1, and it reads what's actually for sale right now and hands back a shortlist, each car with a plain-English read on whether it's worth it and what to check. Idea to working product in three weeks.
The Field's shortlist results screen
The shortlist, with a straight read on each car.
The daily brief7am, every day
A bespoke market brief built for a private collector: the cars he cares about, found, read and summarised in his inbox before breakfast. Built to his spec, tuned to his taste.
The bespoke 7am collector's brief
The 7am brief, as received.

I run these because I'd rather spend my time on the parts of a business a machine can't do. If there's a job like these eating your week, tell me about it →

How it works

A quick, free look at what's eating your time → a fixed price for a defined job → working in days. No lock-in, no jargon, no big software project.

Tell me what's eating your time.

A line or two is plenty. I'll take a look and tell you honestly whether I can help. No obligation.

No spam, no list. This just lands in my inbox.

Got it. Thank you.

I'll have a proper look and get back to you honestly about whether I can help. Talk soon, Ben