Build the team you can't afford yet.
We build the AI agents, run the project, and own the implementation end to end.
Founder-led UK businesses, £1m to £20m. From £2,500. Project live within 30 days. Stop hiring for work AI can do.
Headcount is the most
expensive way to grow.
You're hiring to keep up.
Repetitive ops work creeps in and you patch with people. Three hires deep, the payroll bill has doubled and the bottleneck has only moved.
AI tools are a graveyard.
Your team's using ChatGPT. Nobody's measuring whether it saved anything. None of it's connected to your actual workflows. It's noise, not real change.
You don't need a six-month project.
You can't afford an in-house AI engineer. You don't want an enterprise transformation. You need someone who ships in weeks and stays for the long haul.
Diagnose. Build. Run.
Three stages, one partnership. We start with a paid diagnostic, build the agents from the roadmap, and stay on to run them. You get a team without the headcount.
We start with a hard look at where your time goes.
We go department by department - finance, ops, marketing, support, people - and follow the high-value workflows. Then we tell you exactly which ones could be replaced by AI agents, off-the-shelf AI tools, or smarter platform setup, what they'd save, and how fast we can ship them.
We ship working agents, not slide decks.
Custom agents, off-the-shelf AI tools, or smarter setup of platforms you already use - whichever ships fastest with the biggest return. First build live within 30 days of kick-off. Documented, handed over properly, and stitched into the workflows your team already runs.
We don't ship and disappear.
Every workflow we deliver comes with a Run period bundled into the build quote - monitoring, tuning, iteration, and same-day support for the months that matter most. Renews on the same terms after that, only if you want it to.
The shape of
practical AI work.
Most of what we ship sits in one of six categories. Sometimes a custom agent. Sometimes an off-the-shelf tool wired into your stack. Sometimes a smarter setup of platforms you already pay for. Always the right tool, not the trendy one.
Reconciliation & close.
Bank feeds, intercompany, supplier ledgers, returns. Three-tier match: the easy cases clear automatically, the exceptions reach a human with context attached. Close cycles drop from days to hours.
Customer service triage.
Tier-one resolution, intent classification, routing. The agent reads the ticket, pulls the customer record, resolves the simple cases, and escalates the rest with context pre-loaded.
Reporting & forecasting.
Weekly and monthly packs assembled overnight. Cash forecasts pulled daily from AP and AR ledgers. The Monday morning report ready before standup, with the three things that moved already surfaced.
Supplier & contract ops.
KYC, document validation, terms application, contract clause extraction, renewal tracking. Sits behind your AP team and catches deadlines before they slip past.
Cross-system workflow.
When the workflow involves three platforms and a spreadsheet, we wire them. Returns reconciliation across CS, ecom and warehouse. Order exception handling. Stock allocation across channels.
Off-the-shelf integration.
Claude, GPT, or Codex wired into platforms you already pay for: Shopify, Xero, HubSpot, Slack, Notion, Klaviyo. Where a custom agent isn't the sharpest answer, the right integration is.
One way in.
Then it depends.
Every engagement starts with a Clerq Diagnostic, scoped to your business and quoted on the 20-min intro call. Where we focus, what we build, and how much it costs after that is shaped by what the Diagnostic actually finds - not by what tier you fit into. We size to your business, not the other way around.
A proper diagnostic, not a sales call. We go department by department, find the workflows costing you the most, and come back with a clear roadmap and fixed-price quotes for whatever we recommend building. Final fee depends on the size of your business and the breadth of what we look at - quoted on a 20-min intro call before anything starts.
What comes after the Diagnostic is shaped by what we find. Builds are scoped and quoted from the Diagnostic findings, with monitoring, tuning, and support bundled in. Some workflows are best solved with one of our pre-built modules (subscription-priced). All of it agreed upfront, all of it fixed, no surprises.
When we've already
solved your problem.
A handful of workflows come up so often across our clients that we've built proper, productised versions. If the Diagnostic finds you need one of these, you skip the custom build entirely - same problem solved, faster and cheaper, on subscription. Optional. Always.
What this actually
looks like in practice.
Anonymised for confidentiality. Real workflows, real numbers, real outcomes. The point isn't the brand - it's what shifts when you stop hiring for the work AI can do.
Marketplace take rate, lifted by 2 points
Pricing model couldn't react fast enough to market signals. Take rate sliding, contribution margin under trading pressure, supplier onboarding eating analyst hours. We worked with the leadership team on the workflows protecting the bottom line.
"We thought it was a pricing problem. Turned out it was a speed problem. Now the model reacts the same day."
Retail rollout that didn't break the back office
Growth-stage founder-led brand more than doubling its physical footprint while ecommerce kept growing. 3PL information flows breaking, store P&L visibility patchy, promotional spend hard to attribute. We built the agents that closed the gaps as the rollout accelerated.
"We doubled the footprint in 18 months. Margin didn't crack. The back office never became the bottleneck."
Returns reconciliation, fully automated
Three separate systems holding three versions of the truth on the same returns. Two days a month to reconcile, and a steady drip of leakage nobody could quite prove. One agent now matches every return across all three, daily, and flags the exceptions to the founder.
"We knew there was leakage. Now the agent catches it before we'd have even noticed."
Marketing reporting, done by Monday morning
The Monday marketing review was a six-hour panic, every week. Pulling numbers by hand from paid media, email, GA4 and the ecommerce backend, then stitching them into a deck. Now an agent does all of it overnight and lands the report in Slack before standup.
"I stopped dreading Monday. The agent has the numbers ready before I've finished my coffee."
Finance team headcount reduced by two
PE-backed multi-brand consumer group running several trading entities on different systems. Close running 14 days, weekends included. Intercompany journals manual. Group reporting late and inconsistent. We built the agents to harmonise the shape and the finance team got smaller while doing more.
"The finance team got smaller. The reporting got better. Nobody believed it was possible at the same time."
Built by operators.
Clerq is run by ex-CFOs, COOs, and operators who've scaled the businesses you're trying to scale. We've sat in your seat: the headcount spiral, the bridging spreadsheet, the moment the team can't keep up but the budget can't stretch.
We're not consultants. We build. Operators who've actually run businesses get the best out of AI, because we know which workflows are worth automating and which look automatable until you try. That's the bit you can't read in a deck.
Small core team, remote-first, specialist partners plugged in per project.
The questions founders ask.
What does the Clerq Diagnostic actually deliver?
A department-by-department review - finance, ops, marketing, support, people - following the high-value workflows. You get a written roadmap with timelines and fixed-price quotes for everything we recommend building, plus a 60-minute walkthrough with you and your team. No tiers, no surprises, no upsell baked into the diagnosis.
What does the Diagnostic cost?
From £2,500. The final fee is shaped by the size of your business and the breadth of what we look at, and is quoted on the 20-minute intro call before anything starts. The price of finding out what's worth doing is predictable. The price of doing it depends on what we find, and is quoted upfront and fixed before any build starts.
Do you build custom AI, or just plug in off-the-shelf tools?
Whichever is right for the workflow. Sometimes the answer is a custom agent. Sometimes it's wiring Claude or GPT or Codex into a tool you already use. Sometimes it's a smarter setup of Shopify, Klaviyo, HubSpot, Slack, or Notion. Sometimes it's one of our pre-built modules. We pick the option that ships fastest with the biggest return - the right tool, not the trendy one.
How is this different from hiring a consultant?
Consultants write reports. We ship working things. The Diagnostic is just the first step. After that, we build at fixed prices per workflow, and we offer ongoing support and iteration as a light monthly add-on. You get a partner, not a deck.
What kinds of workflows do you typically automate?
The right way to think about it is: anything repetitive, rule-based, or judgement-light that's currently the reason you're about to make a hire, or the reason a decision is taking three days when it could take three minutes. Those are the two outcomes we care about - headcount you can defer, and decisions you can make faster. Recurring reconciliations. Marketing and finance reporting. Supplier onboarding. Returns and exception handling. Customer support triage. Inbound enquiry routing. Contract review. Bookkeeping prep. Sales-lead qualification. Some of these save FTE. Some collapse a weekly five-hour reporting job into a Slack message. The Diagnostic finds yours, ranked by which lever moves the most.
What kind of businesses do you work with?
Founder-led UK businesses, typically 1 to 80 people. Often Shopify-based DTC brands, ecommerce operators, and service businesses. Anyone who has outgrown the spreadsheets, isn't ready (or doesn't need) an in-house CTO or AI engineer, and wants help running leaner without bloating headcount.
How quickly do you ship?
First workflow live within 30 days of kick-off. Most clients have 3 to 5 workflows running within 90 days. Some workflows are much faster if we use one of our pre-built modules.
What happens after you ship?
We don't ship and disappear. Every workflow we deliver comes with the option to keep us on for monitoring, tuning, and iteration. Same-day support via a shared Slack channel. Monthly review call. Scoped and quoted upfront, alongside the build itself, so there are no surprises.
Where do the Clerq Contracts / Finance / People modules fit?
Those are productised solutions for the problems we see across every client. If the Diagnostic finds you've got one of those problems, you skip the custom build and adopt the module on subscription instead - faster, cheaper, properly integrated. They're optional. The agency engagement is where we make our money; the modules just save us reinventing the wheel.
Stop hiring for the work AI can do.
A 20-minute call to walk through where you're bleeding hours and whether we're the right team to fix it. No commitment. If it's a fit, we'll talk Diagnostic on the call.