One
Something lands, and you’re busy.
A phone call. A text. A WhatsApp. A form off your website. Somebody at ten past four who is about to ring the next firm on the list.
You are: up a ladder
Plumbers & heating engineers
AI for plumbers
Right — what is it?
It’s a helper that lives in your phone. When you can’t get to the phone, it does — and it talks to people the way you would. It writes your quotes off a voice note in the van. It chases your money until they pay. Then it sends you one text, and you answer it with one word.
That’s the whole product. There is nothing to log into and nothing to learn.
- 7h 55ma week it takes off you
- 1 textis all you have to read
- £0to try it for a fortnight
01 / 08
Apprenti · triaging the emergency
Someone rings at four with no heating. It works out that’s urgent, tells them what you charge, and puts them in tomorrow’s first slot.
01
It only ever works one way
However complicated the job, it’s always these three things in this order. If you understand this bit you understand the entire product, and you can stop reading.
Two
It deals with it, in your words.
It picks up. It asks the questions you’d ask, says what you charge, checks your diary and books them in. Everything it says comes off your price list and your diary — never out of thin air.
You are: still up a ladder
Three
You get one text. You reply “yes”.
Not a notification. Not an inbox. One text, at a sensible hour, with the whole thing in it and a question at the end. Unless it’s an emergency — then your phone rings, because that’s what you told it to do.
You are: down the ladder, having your tea
Everything below this line is just the same three moves, applied to a different Tuesday.
02
Stop reading. Watch one.
This is a real job, start to finish, with nothing left out — every message that got sent, who sent it, and what you had to do. The notes down the side tell you how it knew. Pick the one nearest to what you do.
Tuesday, ten to five
You are
Up a ladder, halfway through a beech hedge.
Mrs OkaforHi — saw your van on Wilton Road. Our back garden has completely got away from us. The hedge needs doing and there’s a lot of stuff to take away. Are you taking on new work?
Your phone rings twice and then stops. You don’t hear it. You’re up a ladder.
Apprenti, as youHello — I’m the assistant for Whyte Gardens, Dan’s out on a job. He is taking work on, yes. Whereabouts on Wilton Road are you, and could you send me a couple of photos of the hedge?
Mrs OkaforNumber 61. It’s about twenty metres and it’s a good two foot over the fence now.2 photos
It has your price list. Twenty metres of beech, reduce and shape, plus a green-waste run. It does not make the number up — it reads it off your own sheet.
Apprenti, as youThanks, that’s helpful. That would be around £220 for the hedge and £60 to take the waste away — Dan will confirm it. He has Thursday morning free. Shall I pencil you in?
Mrs OkaforThursday is perfect, thank you!
And now — only now, when there is actually something to decide — it bothers you.
Apprenti, to youMrs Okafor, 61 Wilton Rd. Beech hedge ~20m, reduce + shape, green waste. Quoted £280. Pencilled Thursday 9am. OK?
Youyes
AngelaHello? My boiler’s gone off and there’s no hot water at all. My mum’s staying with us and she’s eighty-four. Can anyone come out?
You told it once what counts as an emergency. No heat, with somebody vulnerable in the house, is one.
Apprenti, as youI’m the assistant for Ridley Heating. That does sound urgent, so let’s get you sorted. Can I take the postcode and the make of the boiler? There’s a £95 call-out and then £70 an hour — is that alright?
AngelaM21 9RT. It’s a Worcester I think. Yes, that’s fine.
It has decided this one can’t wait until seven o’clock. So it doesn’t text. It rings you.
Apprenti, to youURGENT · no heat, 84yo in house. Angela Boyd, M21 9RT, Worcester combi. Accepted £95 + £70/hr. Tonight, or first thing?
Youfirst thing, 8am
Apprenti, as youSteve can be with you between eight and nine tomorrow morning. If it gets worse overnight, ring this number back and it’ll come straight through to him.
You“Blue Focus on ramp two — rear discs are shot and the offside drop link’s gone. Another four hundred odd on top of the MOT.”0:12
Twelve seconds talking at your phone, and back to the car. You did not write anything, ring anybody or open a computer.
Apprenti, as youHello Mr Harris — Bramall Lane Motors. While your Focus was in for its MOT we found the rear brake discs are worn past the limit and one of the suspension drop links has failed. Photos attached. It can’t pass the MOT as it is. £412 all in — parts, labour, VAT and the retest. Happy for us to go ahead?3 photos
This is the bit that gets you paid: he can see it, he understands it, and he’s got a number. On the phone at five o’clock he’d have said “leave it”.
Mr HarrisBlimey. Go on then. Is it still ready today?
Apprenti, as youIt is — we’ll have it back with you by five.
You find out when you next stand up straight.
Apprenti, to youHarris approved the £412. Told him five o’clock. Parts are in stock.
MartaSorry Jo, I’ve been up all night being sick. I can’t do today. I’m really sorry.
It knows the round: who cleans what, who holds a key, who has a dog, and who has told you before that they cannot do Thursdays.
Before you’ve put a foot on the floor, it has already done the puzzle.
Apprenti, to youMarta’s off sick. Her four today: Ashworth (we hold the key), Bevan, Casey (dog), Duffy. Priya can pick up Ashworth + Bevan. Casey and Duffy would have to move to Thursday — both fine with Thursday before. Shall I do it?
Youdo it
Four customers, one member of staff, and Marta. All told in your words, not a template. Nobody is left to find out for themselves.
Apprenti, as youMorning Mrs Casey — it’s Bright & Co. One of our girls is off ill today so rather than send someone who doesn’t know your house, could we move you to Thursday at the same time? Sorry for the short notice.
Mrs CaseyNo problem at all, Thursday’s fine.
You“Chapel Street. Single storey rear, about twenty-eight square metres, existing kitchen out, steel over the opening, three metres of bifolds, underfloor…”38:20
Thirty-eight minutes of you talking while you drive. No notes, no measuring up twice, no sitting down with a laptop.
It has read your last hundred quotes. It knows your layout, your margins, how you word your provisional sums, and that you always price the scaffold separately.
It’s on your phone before you’ve finished your tea.
Apprenti, to youChapel Street quote drafted — 5 pages, £61,400 + VAT, scaffold priced separately as usual. Two things I’ve guessed at, both flagged in yellow. Have a read?
Youchange the steel to a 254 and send it
Apprenti, as youChanged and sent. I’ll chase them on Wednesday if we’ve not heard.
03
“Saves you time” is easy to say
So here’s the arithmetic instead. This is a normal week off one van — not a survey, not a statistic, just the jobs that end up on the kitchen table. Cross out the rows that aren’t you and see where you land.
The week you don’t get paid fortap a row to cross it outHrs
- Ringing back the calls you missed2h 10mand the three you never got round to at all
- Writing quotes at the kitchen table3h 00musually a Sunday. Sometimes never
- Chasing people for money55mthe one everybody puts off longest
- Reminding, rebooking, rearranging1h 20mweather, cancellations, running late
- Hunting for a certificate or receipt40mit was definitely in the van
- Answering the same question again35m“do you cover Stockport?” — fourteen times
A week, every week
8h 40m
7h 55mApprenti does this bit
45mYou keep this bit — it’s the deciding
And then there’s the work that walked
Harder to count, because you never find out. It’s the three people a week who rang, got voicemail, and rang somebody else — and the two quotes that were going to get written on Sunday.
We’re not going to invent a number for that. You know roughly what a job is worth to you. Do that sum yourself. It comes out a good deal bigger than fifty-nine quid, and that’s before the eight hours.
- a.
The call at
rang the next firm on the listten past four - b.
The quote for
it’s ThursdaySunday - c.
The invoice from
nobody has asked twiceMarch - d.
The service that was
they went elsewheredue in June - e.
The certificate that
you’ll find out when somebody asksquietly expired - f.
The ten o’clock
the slot just sat therecancellation
04
Nobody has actually told you what AI is
They’ve told you it’s coming for your job, or that it’s going to change everything, or that you need a strategy. Here is the whole thing, honestly, in the time it takes to drink a brew.
It’s a computer that can read and write like a person can.
That’s it. That is genuinely the whole thing. It isn’t a robot, it isn’t thinking, it doesn’t want anything, and it is not coming for your job — it cannot hold a spade, get up a ladder or tell whether a boiler smells wrong.
What it can do is read a message, work out what somebody is actually asking for, and write back something sensible. It can do that four hundred times a day without getting bored, without getting short with a difficult customer at half five on a Friday, and without ever once forgetting to follow up.
Which is a completely useless skill for most of what you do. And an extremely good one for the two hours of reading and writing you do after your tea.
Genuinely good at
- Reading and writing like a person
- Remembering everything, forever
- Doing the boring bit the four-hundredth time as well as the first
- Being polite to somebody who isn’t
- Never forgetting to chase
Genuinely rubbish at
- Knowing what you charge
- Knowing the Fletcher job always overruns
- Knowing which customer is a nightmare
- Judging anything it’s never seen before
So it doesn’t guess. It asks you once, writes it down, and never asks again. That’s the entire trick, and it’s why this works and a chatbot doesn’t.
And the things it flatly cannot do — said out loud, before you pay us
- It won’t magic up new customers. It works your phone and your own book. It doesn’t do marketing and it can’t make the phone ring.
- It won’t do your accounts. It’ll tell your bookkeeper exactly who owes you what. It isn’t filing anything with anybody.
- It can’t price a job it’s never seen the like of. First time, it asks you — and then it knows.
- It can’t do the actual work. Nobody is fitting a boiler but you.
Show it once
05
You don’t learn AI.
It learns you.
Every other tool hands you a blank box and a login and wishes you luck. This works the way a good apprentice does: you show it round once, it watches how you do things, and after a fortnight you stop checking.
Week one
You show it round.
Twenty minutes on the phone with a person. What you do, what you charge, what counts as an emergency, who not to work for again. It reads your old quotes. You correct it twice. That’s the setup — there is nothing to configure.
Week two
It picks up the phone.
It answers the ones you can’t, books the obvious ones straight into your diary, and sends you the rest as a text you can deal with in one word. You’re still reading everything. By Friday you’ve stopped reading most of it.
Week four
You stop checking.
You notice you haven’t listened to a voicemail in a fortnight, the quotes go out the same day, and nobody has had to ring you twice. That’s the whole change. It isn’t dramatic. It’s just your evenings back.
06
AI for your trade — not for everybody’s
A general assistant is no use to a garage. This one turns up already knowing what an MOT reminder is, what a C2 is, and what happens to a round when a cleaner rings in sick. Pick your trade: the workflows are already written and the prices already have the right words on them.
01
MOT
MOT & repair garages
Answers the phone from under a car
- Books MOTs off a reg lookup
- Runs expiry reminders from your own data
- Turns a terse job note into an estimate people say yes to
02
Plumbers
Plumbers & heating engineers
Triages the emergency you can’t answer
- Emergency triage straight into the diary
- Boiler and bathroom quotes from a voice note
- Annual service recalls off your existing book
03
Builders
Builders & renovators
Writes the quote you never get round to
- Five-page quotes from a site-visit voice note
- Priced, signed variations before they turn into an argument
- Progress updates across a months-long build
04
Electricians
Electricians
Writes up the certificate and the remedial
- Observations drafted from photos and a spoken note
- C2s and C3s converted into a priced remedial
- Five-year recalls off the 2021 landlord book
05
Cleaning companies
Cleaning companies
Covers the cleaner who calls in sick
- Sickness cover and customer notification
- End-of-tenancy quotes from photos
- Payment chasing in your voice, not a debt letter’s
06
Wedding
Wedding & event suppliers
Quotes while you’re working the job
- Same-hour replies to marketplace leads
- Availability checked before it quotes
- Contracts, deposits and the polite third chase
07
Driving instructors
Driving instructors
Books pupils while you’re teaching
- Missed calls and WhatsApps captured and qualified
- Waitlists worked against the test backlog
- Lesson reminders and payment chasing
08
Accountants
Accountants & bookkeepers
Chases the clients so you don’t
- Deadline chasing and record collection
- Onboarding: engagement letters, ID checks, authorisations
- Answers the question you’ve answered 200 times
09
Salons
Salons & barbershops
Fills the gap a cancellation leaves
- Answers mid-colour, books the appointment
- Finds the right twelve clients for a 10am gap
- Works the new clients who never rebook
10
Removals
Removals & man-and-van
Quotes from photos before the others ring back
- Priced quotes from photos or a video walkthrough
- Answers while the crew is loading
- Crew scheduling across peaks and troughs
11
Gyms
Gyms & studios
Notices the member who stopped coming
- Answers DMs and forms while you’re teaching
- Spots the quiet drop-off and does something about it
- Fills the waitlist with someone who’ll actually turn up
12
Gardeners
Gardeners & landscapers
Prices a job from a photo, same evening
- Quotes a one-off without a site visit
- Reschedules round the weather and tells everyone
- Chases payment on variable monthly invoices
13
Locksmiths
Locksmiths
Answers the 2am lockout in one ring
- Emergency answering, qualifying and dispatch
- Callout quoted to your price list
- ETA messages, invoice, review request
14
Physio
Physio, osteo & chiro clinics
Books the patient ringing in pain
- Answers and triages while you’re treating
- Cuts no-shows with reminders people reply to
- Chases the course of treatment nobody finished
15
Restaurants
Restaurants & cafés
Writes next week’s rota and sends it
- Rotas drafted, sent and evidenced
- Bookings taken and amended on the phone
- The no-show messages that actually work
Not on the list?
Tell us what you do and what eats your evenings. If we can already do it we’ll show you; if we can’t, you’ll hear back from a person either way.
Tell us your trade- Also set up for
- Beauty salons & nail bars
- Dental & private GP clinics
- Estate & letting agents
- Veterinary practices
- Tree surgeons
- Pest control
- Roofers & decorators
- Waste clearance & skip hire
- Appliance repair
- Mobile mechanics
- Dog daycare & boarding
- Window cleaning rounds
- Personal trainers
- Pubs & bars
- Holiday-let managers
- Medical aesthetics clinics
07
Five jobs. Done properly.
Not a chatbot. Not a dashboard with forty-one settings. Five jobs that a good person would do for you, if you could find one and afford one. The hours in the margin are the ones off your own week.
2h 10a week
Answers the phone in one ring
Not a menu. Not press one for sales. It picks up, works out whether it’s an emergency, a price question or somebody selling you leads, says what you charge and puts the real ones in the diary. If it’s urgent, it rings you. If they want you, it says so and takes a proper message.
3h 00a week
Writes the quote before you’re home
Talk at your phone on the way back to the van — forty minutes of it if you like. It comes back as a priced quote in your format, at your rates, ready for you to read, change and send. The one that was never getting written on Sunday.
55ma week
Chases the money politely, and forever
A nudge, then a reminder, then an actual phone call — in your words, on a schedule you would never keep up yourself. It answers the excuse rather than repeating the invoice number, and it stops the second they pay.
40ma week
Remembers the paperwork you don’t
Certificates, registrations, renewals, insurance, waste licences. It knows what expires when, tells you a month out rather than the morning of, and drafts the thing you have to send — pre-filled from last year’s.
1h 20a week
Fills the diary you left empty
A ten o’clock cancellation goes to the right twelve people, not blasted at four hundred. Customers due a service get asked. The ones who quietly stopped coming get a reason to come back, before the direct debit does.
In their words · what people actually asked for
“It answers every call while I’m under a car, books the MOT, and texts the customer a plain-English explanation of the £400 of extra work so they actually approve it before lunch.”
Owner, three-bay MOT & repair garage
08
Fair questions from people who don’t care about AI
You shouldn’t have to care. Here’s the honest version of the things everybody asks in the first five minutes — including the awkward ones.
Right, but what do I actually do all day?
You read one text and you answer it with a word. Usually two or three texts a day, at a time that suits you. That is the entire job. There’s no app to check, no inbox filling up, no dashboard going red at you. If a day goes by where nothing needed deciding, you don’t hear from it at all.
Do I have to learn how to talk to it?
No. There is no chat box to stare at and nothing to “prompt”. Somebody rings you, spends twenty minutes asking about your business the way they’d ask in the pub — what you do, what you charge, what counts as an emergency — and it goes to work. When it needs a decision it texts you, and you reply the way you’d reply to your mate.
Will it sound like a robot?
It answers in a normal voice, at a normal speed, and it doesn’t pretend to be a person — it says it’s the assistant for your business, because people can tell anyway and they hate being fooled. If the caller wants you specifically, it says so and takes a proper message. If it’s an emergency, your phone rings.
What if it gets something wrong?
It’s allowed to answer, book and remind. On day one it is not allowed to send a price you haven’t seen, promise a date you can’t make, or spend a penny of your money. Everything else it drafts and hands to you. As you get comfortable you let it off the lead job by job — most people start with invoice chasing, because nobody enjoys that one.
Isn’t this going to put someone out of a job?
If you employ somebody to answer the phone, be honest with yourself before you buy this — it does a good chunk of what they do. Most of the people we build this for don’t employ anybody for it: the phone gets answered by whoever is nearest, which is nobody, which is why it goes to voicemail. This isn’t replacing a person. It’s replacing an evening.
Do I need a computer?
No. If you can use WhatsApp you can use this. It lives on your phone, it messages you like a person, and you can go months without opening anything that looks like software.
Does my phone number change?
No — that number is on your van, your invoices and eleven years of Google reviews. It stays yours. Calls you pick up are just calls. Calls you don’t pick up within a few rings go to Apprenti instead of voicemail, and you get the transcript before you’ve wiped your hands.
What happens to my customers’ details?
They stay yours. Your customer list, your recordings, your account — held in the UK, exportable in one click, deletable in two. We don’t sell it, we don’t rent it to your competitors, and we don’t use your customers’ conversations to train anything.
I already use software for my diary. Do I have to bin it?
No, and please don’t. It sits on top of what you have — reads the diary, writes bookings back into it, and picks up the jobs your existing software has never done, which is most of the ones on this page. If you don’t use anything at all, that’s fine too; a lot of people don’t.
09
One price. No per-seat nonsense.
Two pounds a day. Put it next to what you already pay for things that do less.
- £3.00a call, to a human answering service that can’t book, quote or chase anything
- £150+a day for a part-timer in the office, plus the National Insurance
- £280one hedge. One job it catches pays for four months of it
- £59a month. Everything on this page. Cancel by text
Apprentice
£59/month
One van, one chair, one pair of hands.
- Answers your phone and your messages
- Books straight into your diary
- Quotes from a voice note and photos
- Chases every unpaid invoice
- Keeps your number
14 days. No card.
Most take this one
Improver
£99/month
Two to ten people, a real diary, a real backlog.
- Everything in Apprentice
- Reminder and recall campaigns off your own book
- Cancellations offered to the right people
- Certificates, renewals and expiry dates
- WhatsApp, Instagram and web enquiries
14 days. No card. Cancel by text.
Time-served
£149/month
Multi-van, multi-chair, multi-site.
- Everything in Improver
- Staff scheduling, sickness cover and swaps
- Several diaries and several sites
- Marketplace and portal leads answered first
- A named human you can actually ring
14 days. No card. Cancel by text.
apprenti.cc
Take on an apprentice who works nights
Never rings in sick, never leaves for a bigger firm, and genuinely enjoys chasing invoices. Fourteen days free — if it hasn’t answered a call you’d have missed by day three, don’t pay us.