Jon Burston, Author at hirevolution

Working with a small agency vs a big one: an honest comparison

Two UK premises side by side: a small workshop with one sun-orange lit window and an owner at the bench, beside a tall impersonal office block of blank windows, a figure from behind weighing the choice — the honest trade-off between a small agency and a big one.

Should an SME hire a small agency or a big one? An honest, cited look at the trade-offs, and the five questions that actually predict a good outcome.

Adding an automation capability to your agency without hiring for it

Editorial illustration: a UK agency worker at a tidy desk reaches into an open toolbox to pick up a single new tool picked out in meadow green, putting it straight to use on their laptop — the quiet moment of adding an automation capability without hiring.

Three settled ways to say yes to automation and integration work without putting a developer on payroll: white-label resale, indirect reseller, or a delivery partner.

How to scope an automation project so it does not balloon

A flat top-down diagram of tangled lines on the left funnelling through a shape into a clean meadow-green stack of ordered rectangles on the right — the moment a vague automation want becomes a sequenced plan.

How to scope an automation, CRM or AI project so it does not balloon: four moves, backed by cited research, to keep the build small, deliberate and on budget.

The true cost of downtime for a small business

A small café counter stalled mid-service — the card reader dead and its cable visibly unplugged, the connector hanging loose just out of its wall socket, while the owner pauses with a hand on the dead reader and two customers wait, a wall clock marking the outage.

What downtime really costs a small UK business, worked from cited data: why no single figure fits, the UK numbers that do, and how to size your own.

Where AI actually saves a small team time today (and where it wastes it)

A small-business owner at a plain desk sorts everyday paperwork into two wooden trays — routine sheets going calmly into the meadow-green left tray, trickier specialist documents held back for the right — showing the unhurried triage of deciding which tasks are safe to hand over and which to keep.

Where AI genuinely saves a small team time today, and where it costs more than it returns, worked through with cited research and a simple test for handing a task over.

Most small businesses don’t have a software problem, they have a follow-up problem

Why slow work is usually a follow-up problem, not a software one, with cited research: lead response time, the calls that ring out, and the habit no tool fixes.

Windows 10 support has ended: what end of support actually means for a small business

Editorial illustration: a peopleless UK office shelf still-life — an older boxy desktop computer beside a tear-off wall calendar whose top leaf has curled forward past its date in sun orange, a small open padlock resting against the machine, and a faint cobweb in the corner — the quiet lapse of a system left past its support date.

Windows 10 support ended on 14 October 2025. What end of support really means for a small business, the options Microsoft offers, and why it wants a plan not a panic.

What a good discovery conversation should cover (whoever you hire)

A supplier seen from behind sits at a desk with an open ink-blue notebook, listening attentively to a business owner on a video call — the calm, unhurried feel of a genuine discovery conversation before anything is sold.

A vendor-neutral checklist for the first conversation with any software or automation supplier: the questions a real discovery asks, and the tells of a sales call.

When a spreadsheet becomes a liability: the real cost of manual reporting

A person at a desk hand-copying figures between two open paper ledgers, a large sun-orange wall clock above — showing how manual reporting consumes skilled time.

When a spreadsheet quietly becomes infrastructure, it costs hours and hides errors. Cited research on the real cost of manual reporting, and where the line is.

What a customer portal can replace (and what it cannot)

Scattered admin items — envelopes, message slips, a folder and a spreadsheet sheet — converging into one calm ink-blue doorway with a letter-slot, showing what a customer portal consolidates into a single access point.

Which customer-service exchanges a portal can genuinely take off your desk, and which still need a person, worked through with cited research for UK SMEs.