Your business shouldn't need you for every decision.
We find your most expensive bottlenecks and replace them with AI systems you own. Guaranteed to hand you back 10+ hours of your week, worth around £50,000 a year to a £200k business.
Most SME founders are the bottleneck in their own business.
You got stuck into delivery and operations, and somewhere along the way everything started routing through you, and the growth plateaued. Nearly every founder we speak to is stuck in at least one of these.
You've got no time to sell.
Delivery and operations eat the week, so the pipeline only gets attention when it's nearly empty. Then it's feast and famine: panic, land some work, disappear into delivering it, panic again. Selling is the one job only you can do, and it's the first thing that stops.
Everything routes through you.
- Decisions
- Knowledge
- Relationships
- Actions
If you're not in the room, it waits for you. The business runs on your memory, and every question pulls you away from the work that actually grows it.
None of the fixes are working.
The ops hire, the marketing agency on retainer, the new tools, the AI. Without proper systems and foundations underneath, they add cost and admin without handing you your time back.
You're losing money on repetitive operations.
Repetitive processes are costing you six figures a year in time. Manual work, chasing updates, moving the same information between apps. And every hour of it comes out of selling time.
This is exactly what we remove. The audit names the bottlenecks eating your week and puts a price on them. The build replaces them with AI systems you own and know how to run, so your time goes back into growing the business.
The Bottleneck Audit, then the Build.
Two stages, one decision at a time. The call is where the audit starts, not where a pitch happens.
Stage 01 · Two weeks
The Bottleneck Audit
We work with you and your team to uncover your most expensive bottlenecks.
- Which take the longest?
- Which cost the most?
We score each one across the four dependencies, decisions, knowledge, relationships and actions, and price it against your actual numbers.
You walk away with the full map. Build it yourself, build it with anyone, or carry on with us: the audit fee credits in full against the Build.
Stage 02 · Six months
The Build
We remove your most expensive bottlenecks one at a time. Each workflow built, tested and working every month, in the audit's priority order, and signed off in front of you before the next one starts.
Everything sits on your infrastructure from day one. Your accounts, your keys, your systems. And month one is discounted: the price of the audit is taken off.
By building these systems, your business immediately becomes more valuable when you decide to sell it.
At the end you own all of it. The systems, the skills, the automations and the documentation, with nothing left to pay us.
Book a call10 hours of your week back. Guaranteed.
The audit prices exactly what your bottlenecks are costing you, both in time and money. You sign everything off before we build it. We then work through your most expensive workflows month by month, each one built, tested and production ready. If that list isn't done by month six, we keep building at no extra cost.
And it ends in ownership. The systems, the skills, the automations, the documentation: all of it on your infrastructure, all of it yours.
“Everything I know lives in my head, and I'm running a ton of money through my business while being so unorganised. Then I saw this. Obviously I need help, and this is it, right here. It's beautiful.”
Michelle
One of our OS clients
“I came in for cold email, but I've stayed for the way Josh thinks about these tools. Everything I've learned is built into how my business operates, and I own all the processes. If I leave, I take it with me.”
Dillon
Modern Founder OS™ Member
The other option is another salary, or multiple retainers.
A hire costs £26,000 to £30,000 a year, every year, and covers one skill set. An agency retainer covers one more. We've built sales systems, email systems, operations and AI systems, as you can see in the case studies, so you're solving multiple bottlenecks in one, rather than hiring one person for each.
Another hire
£26,000 to £30,000 a year, every year
- One skill set, one bottleneck covered
- Needs managing, training and holidays
- The questions still come to you
- Moves the bottleneck, doesn't remove it
- Leaves, and takes the knowledge with them
AI systems you own
Built once, yours for good
- Sales, email, operations and AI in one
- Runs the workflow without asking you
- Documented, so anyone can pick it up
- Removes the bottleneck at the root
- No notice period, no rehiring
Modern Founder OS.
Everything the custom build does for you, but you learn how to do it yourself. Build a knowledge base and internal operating system, custom AI skills and automations for yourself, so you can start running your business without being the bottleneck.
Step 01
Build your AI clone
Your knowledge base, your documents, your voice, your business. So AI never forgets, and produces genuinely good work instead of generic guesses.
Step 02
Build the internal OS
The system your business runs on alongside AI. Projects, tasks, clients, meetings, knowledge, analytics and CRM, all under one roof your team and agents work from.
Step 03
Build the AI layer
Automation, analysis, agents. The layer that keeps everything live and takes the manual guesswork out. You can then build further systems on top of solid infrastructure.
Support
Weekly group calls
Twice a week with experts. Get personalised business advice and remove blockages so they don't cost you a week.
Support
Workshops
Specialised training and expert insights on specific topics and what's working right now.
Support
Community
Other founders building the same OS as you, there to support each other and help you grow even faster.
Creative consultant turned modern AI-powered founder.
I'm Josh, founder of Side by Side.
I spent fifteen years as a 3D designer and creative consultant. I never wanted the usual path of opening a studio or an agency. I was more interested in the systems underneath a business, the actual parts that make it money. So at the start of 2025 I pivoted properly into AI and automation, and built Side by Side.
The first thing I built was a cold email system, which after success personally, then created over £300k worth of opportunities for a mentor of mine.
2026 has been all about AI and implementing it into my own small business and others. The most important thing we created for our AI use was an internal operating system. Everything out of my head and into one place my team and my AI agents could both work from. Once that was in place, AI stopped being a chat window and started doing real work. Other founders saw it and started asking me to build them the same thing.
That's what we do now. We find the bottlenecks that need you and replace them with AI systems you own, built on an internal OS. After being a heavy user of code-based AI to build systems, architecture and value, I've seen just how much of a founder's week this hands back.
Along the way I've built a lot of different systems: cold email engines, CRMs, operations and project systems, content pipelines, whole internal operating systems. Honestly, the real skill underneath it all is problem solving, and it's pointed at one job: removing you as the bottleneck. Whatever your business needs us to be, that's the support system we become, so you're freed up for the things that actually matter.
And how we work is simple: we lead, you execute. You're not paying us to ask what you think we should build.
“We're now in a position where we can scale. That just wasn't possible before.”
1 week
Retreat to pivot the entire company
Rebuilt
Service offering and operations
Scale fast
Now positioned to grow like never before
Dave Dick
Agency founder
“It completely blew my mind. I called my business partner and we scheduled a one-week retreat to pivot our entire company.”
“Josh has completely rewired how we think about the agency world. Now we actually feel like we're innovating in our business and our industry.”
Dave came to Josh about email, and ended up joining one of our Claude Code workshops on how to build systems that run the business. It blew his mind, to the point he called his business partner and booked a one-week retreat to pivot the entire company.
They rebuilt their service offering, how they operate, and how their creative process runs. Now they do deeper work on what actually matters to clients, with systems handling everything else: acquiring customers, managing them, communicating with them, and growing the business.
“We feel so powerful after all the work we've done. We're now in a position where we can scale, and that just wasn't possible before.”
Dave came for email and left having rebuilt his company around a proper internal operating system.
John was the bottleneck in his £25k+ a month architecture business.
Deals, leads and projects were tracked by hand or in Excel, there was no project management system, and all of it relied on him. We've been working with him since March, systemising what he does: one CRM, one project system, an AI layer on top. His main bottlenecks have been removed, and we're now working on scale.
10+ hrs
Of his week back, every week
£1,250
Of his time back weekly
15 min
Status meetings, down from an hour
Patrick's bottleneck was a system for acquisition.
He'd just parted ways with a VA and a salesperson, so we built him a cold email machine that does the job instead. He owned everything, and it ran without demanding too much of his time.
£325k+
Total pipeline generated
35+
Qualified opportunities in 45 days
100+
Hours saved on manual research
0
Hours Patrick spent building it
Patrick O'Connell
Founder, Profitable Designer
“We've got 35 qualified leads in the pipeline. If we multiply that by our average transaction value, we're probably approaching $200,000 in opportunities. And I've basically done nothing to get to this point.”
Patrick recorded this 45 days in. We've since generated over £325k in total pipeline together.
Patrick runs an online mentoring and coaching business for designers around the world. His acquisition relied on people he'd just moved on from, so we built the whole outbound system for him. The only thing he did was buy five or six domains.
45 days later: 35 qualified leads in the pipeline. Approaching $200,000 in opportunities. We've since passed £325k.
This is what the build does: one expensive workflow, replaced with a system Patrick owns.