The first thing we fixed wasn't software — it was Office 2010

Everyone loves to talk about AI and automation. Here's the unglamorous truth about where this project actually started: my mum's Outlook kept crashing.

Not occasionally — constantly. Email is the lifeblood of a business coordinating a team across the country, and hers was falling over daily. When I looked, the reason was almost funny: she was still running Office 2010. Software old enough to be in high school.

You can't build the future on top of something that's quietly broken.

So before a single clever idea, we did the boring, essential thing: upgraded to Microsoft 365. Modern, supported, and — crucially — it just works. The crashes stopped. Email became something she could rely on again instead of fight with.

It sounds too basic to mention. But this is exactly the kind of thing that holds small businesses back: not a lack of ambition, but old tools nobody's had the time to replace. Sometimes the highest-leverage fix isn't the exciting one — it's the one that stops the daily headache so everything else becomes possible.

Lesson one of this whole project: look before you build.