Introducing PoshLayer™ Flow, the jobs that never get done

Start with the job, not the software

Take a bathroom fitter in south Manchester. Good work, good reviews, a website that says he covers Didsbury, Withington and Sale.

He has just finished his third job in Chorlton. He would like the website to say he covers Chorlton, because people search for a trade and a place in the same breath, and a page that says the place is the page that gets found.

Here is what that costs him today, at any agency:

• An email asking for a new area page.
• A wait, because it is small and everything else is bigger.
• Someone writes copy about Chorlton without having been there.
• Someone adds the page to the menu, and to the list of areas, and to the sitemap, and remembers the postcodes.
• An invoice for an hour of work.

Weeks later there is a page about Chorlton. He has since finished two jobs in Whalley Range and has stopped mentioning it.

One job, start to finish

He opens PoshLayer™ Desk on his phone in the van, presses Add an area you cover, fills in three things and sends it. The page exists before he has finished his tea, and goes live when he says so.

01The job that keeps waiting Three jobs done in Chorlton, and the website still does not say he works there. Instead of emailing the agency, he opens Desk and presses Add an area you cover. 02The postcodes arrive filled in He types the town and the postcodes arrive from the data, not from a guess. He strikes out the one he does not travel to, and writes the line about the area himself. 03What it did, and what it has not PoshLayer™ Flow writes the page, lists it, links it, and tells search engines it exists. Then it stops — nothing is public until he presses the second button. 04His site, that afternoon The page is live on his own site, in his own brand, in the navigation. The line under the heading is the one he typed.

Why the fields are yours

This is the part that is not obvious, and it is what stops Flow being a contact form with ambition.

The fields in that screen are not a form we designed. They are read from your own website’s structure — the actual shape of your area pages, your gallery, your services — so what you are filling in is the real thing rather than a request for someone else to fill it in later. When your site gains a field, the flow gains it too.

Which is also why the flows differ per business. A fitter has add an area you cover. A clinic has add a treatment. A shop has put a product on sale until Sunday. Nobody is choosing from a menu of generic actions.

What it will and will not do on its own

Some flows you press. Others run when something happens — an invoice is paid, an enquiry arrives, a project moves a stage. Both end up in the same place, which is a list of what ran.

The rule underneath is worth saying plainly, because it is the difference between automation you can leave running and automation you cannot:

Anything a flow does unattended is reversible, or a draft. It can write an invoice; it cannot send one. It can prepare a proposal; a person presses the button. It can open a task for whoever is on it. Where money or a customer’s inbox is involved, the last step is always a human, by construction rather than by policy.