01
The look-round
Free
An hour at your place. We watch how the work actually flows, ask daft questions, and say where AI would save real time and where it would just be a toy. You get a one-page aye/nay list. No pitch.
Book one →Ey up. Yorkshire-built AI for Yorkshire businesses.
Ey-aye is a small Harrogate outfit that builds businesses and the systems behind them: the brand, the marketing, the back end, and now the bit where AI makes it all run. We'll come and look at how yours actually works, say what AI is worth doing and what it isn't, then build the bit that is. If the answer's nay, you've lost an hour and a brew.
Harrogate, Knaresborough, Ripon, Wetherby and anywhere within an hour's drive.
[Photo: Paul at a client's front desk, laptop open, looking at the camera.]
ayeit can read tomorrow's bookings and brief your front desk before 8am.
nayit won't replace Sharon. Sharon knows where everything is.
ayeit can write the quote while you're still in the van.
nayit won't send it without you reading it first.
ayeyour customer data stays yours, not in somebody's training set.
naynobody's selling you a chatbot here. Nobody wants a chatbot.
Everyone's worried about missing out on AI. Nobody's sure where it goes.
That's not your fault. The adverts don't help. Every other post on Facebook is a "does it all for you" system for £200 a month, and most of them are a thin wrapper round the same ChatGPT you could use yourself for a tenner.
Here's the honest order of things. Most businesses get the first big win from using the tools they already pay for properly. Some need those tools plugged into their own systems. A few need something built. We'll tell you which you are, and we won't sell you the third one if the first one does the job.
naythe £200-a-month "AI employee" from a Facebook ad. It's a chatbot with a logo and a contract.
ayean afternoon learning to make Claude or ChatGPT do your quotes, your emails and your reports the way you'd do them. No new subscription.
ayewhen that runs out of road, something built for your systems, that you own, that does the one job properly.
What we do
Four things, in this order. Most people stop after the second one, and that's fine.
02 · Most people start here
The half-day
£350
Four hours at your place with Claude or ChatGPT and your own data: last month's bookings, the quotes you sent, the spreadsheet you dread. By the end you've built a dashboard or a report yourself and you know what to ask for. No new subscription, no jargon, and you keep every prompt we write together.
Book a half-day →03
The build
From £2,500
One job, fixed price, four weeks. We take the biggest aye from the look-round and build it into the tools you already use: Wix, Shopify, Xero, QuickBooks, your booking system. You see it working every week, not at the end. You own it.
Talk about a build →04
Fed and watered
From £150 a month
Keeping what we built running. Updates when your software changes, a check-in each month, and a real person on the end of the phone when something looks odd. Cancel whenever. Nothing breaks if you do.
Ask about it →Give your business one place to ask.
Your business already knows the answer to most questions. The trouble is the answer's split across five logins. Bookings in one place, invoices in another, the customer's last email somewhere else, the stock in a spreadsheet.
We join those up so an AI can see all of them at once, safely, read-only where it should be. Then you ask it like you'd ask a good office manager: "Who's in this week that still owes us?" "What did we quote the Smiths last time?" "Which lines haven't sold since spring?" Once that's in place, the automation builds on top of it: the morning brief, the quote that writes itself, the chase that goes out on Friday.
Wix bookingsXero / QuickBooksShopifyEmail and calendarThe spreadsheetThe job system
One place to ask
The morning briefThe quote that writes itselfThe Friday chase
Nothing leaves your systems to be trained on. The AI reads what it's allowed to and no more, and every answer shows where it got it from.
Bodyworks by Corey, Harrogate · our own business, the first build
Every morning, a one-page brief on who's walking in today.
New or returning, last seen, what they booked, what they said on the intake form, where their package is up to. Read over the first brew. No typing, no digging through Wix. We built the practice, the brand and the booking system, so this was the obvious first job.
Read how it was built →[Screenshot of the morning brief, or a photo of it on the front-desk screen]
[Photo: Paul in the workshop or beside the van. Not a headshot.]
Engineer by trade. Business builder by habit.
Ey-aye is Paul Lofthouse. I've launched and run brands of my own. Bodyworks by Corey, the massage and lymphatic drainage practice in Harrogate, is my build from the ground up: Corey is the therapist, and I run the brand, the bookings, the marketing and everything behind the front desk. Purple Helmet, the motorsport apparel brand, is the same story: brand, store, community, back end.
Underneath that I'm an engineer. Twenty years of engine control units, dynamometers and race-car data systems, and lately the software that lets AI talk to all of it. My day job is with an automotive software company whose tools sit inside major car makers' engineering teams, and the biggest AI product I've shipped is theirs: an assistant that lets engineers ask their calibration platform questions in plain English. The same idea runs my own race-data system, which you can see.
So when I say something's worth doing, it's because I've had to make it pay in a business I own, not because it looked good in a slide deck. And if it's worth building, I build it myself.
serviceStraight answers
All posts →Book a look-round
Pick an hour and we'll come to you. If you'd rather talk first, the form reaches a person, not a bot.