Find the work nobody wants to do.

Your first three

Before teams form on Wed Sep 16, post three inefficiencies to Canvas by Friday Sep 11, 11:59pm — same deadline as Log 1, which goes in the Venture Log form, not Canvas — and bring them on paper Wednesday. One can be your index card from day one. For each of the three:

1. Who does it. A real, named organization and the role of the person doing it. Not "a restaurant"; "the front desk at a dental practice in Lexington."
2. What the hands do. One sentence: the actual steps.
3. How often, and how long. Per week, in their estimate or yours.
4. How you know. You did it, you watched it, or they told you. If they told you, one quote in their words.
5. Which bucket. Process, decision, discovery, or outreach.

Satisfactory: all five lines for all three, at least one from a person you talked to, none from a campus organization. A guess with no organization named is Needs Revision.

Ten questions for the process owner

Ask these in your first conversation. Write down the answers verbatim. The best target usually shows up in questions 3, 5, and 8.

1. What do you do every week that you could teach a new hire in an afternoon?
2. What information do you go find before you can make a routine decision, and where does it live?
3. Which task do you avoid because it's tedious, so it piles up?
4. When you say "let me check and get back to you," what are you checking?
5. What gets copied from one place into another by hand? Email to spreadsheet, invoice to QuickBooks, form to calendar.
6. What decision do you make by the same rule every time, but still have to be the one to make?
7. Who waits on whom? Where does a job sit until someone remembers to hand it off?
8. What did you not follow up on last month that cost you money?
9. If you were out for two weeks, what would break first?
10. What do you write that's 80% the same as the last time you wrote it?

Four tests before you commit

• The SOP test. If the owner can dictate a checklist for it in ten minutes, it's automatable. If they can't, you probably picked a judgment call.
• The hours test. Measure how long it takes them now. Minutes per week, error rate, how often it's late. You will report this number again in Week 12. No baseline, no project.
• The frontier test. Try the task with a plain chat prompt on three real examples before you build anything. If the model is bad at it on the easy cases, pick something else.
• The ten-more-customers test. Name ten other organizations doing this the same way and why each would pay to stop. If you can't, it's an errand, not a business.

The shape of a good target

Automations that are working in 2025 and 2026 share three traits: the task is narrow and eats a lot of hours, the criteria for doing it right can be written down, and a person still checks anything that gets cited, invoiced, or promised.

Tasks that are failing share the opposite: they need judgment in unfamiliar situations, they trade on trust, or they require facts to be exactly right with no one checking. Legal research, medical advice, and anything that pretends to be the owner are off the table.

A menu, by category of organization

Each example is a category, not one business. Written as inefficiency → what the harness does → where the human stays. Pick your own; use these to calibrate what "narrow enough" looks like.

Independent restaurants and taprooms

1. Review pile-up across Google, Yelp, and delivery apps → gather reviews, draft replies in the house voice, flag anything mentioning illness or staff → owner approves every reply; health mentions escalate untouched.
2. Weekly produce and protein reorder by gut → pull POS sales, inventory sheet, supplier price lists, propose the order with reasons → chef edits quantities; the agent never places the order.
3. Brewery compliance calendar and production-log rollup → gather logs, prepare filings → brewer signs.

Contractors and trades

4. Estimates take days → site notes and photos in, the firm's estimate template filled from a rules-based price book → contractor sets margin and signs.
5. Missed permit and inspection deadlines → monitor the county portal and the job calendar, draft submissions, remind → office manager submits.

Specialty retail and repair shops

6. "Is my repair ready?" calls → read ticket status, text customers on status changes, answer status questions → technician changes status; pricing disputes go to a person.
7. Seasonal pricing → scan competitor and online prices weekly, flag overstock, propose markdowns inside owner-set floors → owner approves markdowns.

Farms and CSAs

8. Weekly member email → gather the harvest sheet, draft the newsletter and recipes, update the pickup list → farmer edits and sends.
9. Grant and cost-share monitoring → scan opportunities, score fit against the farm profile, draft eligibility summaries → farmer decides which to pursue.

Small nonprofits

10. Donor acknowledgment letters → pull gifts from the CRM, draft compliant letters, queue them → director signs; major gifts flagged for a personal call.
11. Grant reporting → assemble outcomes data and expenses into funder templates → program director verifies every number.
12. Volunteer scheduling → match sign-ups to shifts, send reminders, backfill no-shows from a waitlist → coordinator resolves conflicts.

Professional offices: law, accounting, insurance, real estate

13. Client intake → fill engagement letters from intake answers, flag conflicts against the client list → attorney or CPA reviews and signs. No legal research automated.
14. Realtor listing-prep packet → pull county records and comps, draft the description and disclosure checklist → the human agent sets price and verifies disclosures.

Property managers and landlords

15. Maintenance-request triage → classify urgency by rule, dispatch to the right vendor, draft tenant updates → manager handles emergencies and cost approvals.

Medical, dental, and veterinary practices

16. Recall and no-show follow-up → read the schedule, send reminders, offer waitlist slots by rule → staff confirm anything clinical or financial.

Administrative offices everywhere

A university office counts here, if the process is one that offices everywhere share.

17. Shared inbox triage → classify, draft replies from policy with citations, route exceptions → a person sends; exceptions go to whoever owns the policy.
18. Event logistics → build the run-of-show, draft invites, track RSVPs and reimbursements → coordinator approves spend.
19. Form, PDF, and email data into a spreadsheet or system → gather, extract, enter, flag anomalies → a person reviews the flags.

The four buckets, again