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AI Systems for Owner-Run Businesses
COLD LAVA
Your Business, On One System
The tech team you didn't even have to employ.
Prepared for Fairlight Capital Partners · July 2026
We take the repetitive work that eats your week and build it out of your business until everything runs on one system. Keeping up with AI is our job, not yours.
Financial Services · Construction · Renewables · Recruitment
Oliver Tatler · Jacob Stray
Cold Lava AI Ltd · United Kingdom
coldlava.ai
01The Problem
You're the Bottleneck. And You Know It.
You already know AI matters - you are even wiring up Claude yourselves. But the partners' time is worth more on the phone than on YouTube, and owning this in-house needs a week nobody has. Growing firms don't stall for lack of opportunity - they stall because every question and every decision still routes through the same few people.
01
Three partners running a global firm - and none with a spare week to become the AI expert
02
Every 'quick question' routing to the same people, including the ones a system should answer
03
Data that arrives as files and emails when what everyone needs is one screen they can log into
04
Sales hours spent hunting for the right people to call instead of calling them
05
Software everywhere and nothing joined up - every tool another login, another export, another gap
06
Hiring your way out of it - if the right candidate accepts, stays, and keeps up with a field that changes monthly
“You're not behind. You're just where every firm gets to on its own.”
Fairlight Capital Partners
What We Took From the Call
Charles, Alex - thank you for the time this morning. A genuinely useful first look at where Fairlight is on the AI journey: an already-working firm raising capital for specialist investment products, three founding partners across London, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney, back office in KL. This page is the information we said we would send over, and here is what we took from the conversation.
- 01The accounts team wants to be doing accounts. Instead they field the same questions all day - how much has this client got in the fund, any redemptions this month, what did they hold six months ago. Ten questions a day that a screen should answer.
- 02The reconciliation data already comes back from the fund. What is missing is the dashboard: somewhere the team, and eventually clients, can log in and see assets, trades, subscriptions and redemptions visually.
- 03Your fund is niche, so lead quality beats volume: ten people a day who actually buy the strategy is worth more than a hundred names from Apollo. The sales team should be phoning, not trawling LinkedIn.
- 04Marketing is regulated - a professional-investor fund means the numbers that would make people click are exactly the ones you cannot publish. Outreach has to be personal, personalised and compliant.
- 05You nearly hired an in-house AI expert to go department to department. She took another offer before yours landed - and the partners do not have five evenings a week to become the expert themselves.
This is where we would start: the reconciliation dashboard that kills those ten questions a day. The lead engine comes once that is live.
02What We Build
One System, Built Around Your Firm
We don't sell software off the shelf. We build your business its own operating system - clients, money and comms in one place - and grow it month by month around how you actually work. And to be clear as you scroll: every screen and recording on this page is live in another client's business today. None of it is Fairlight-specific, deliberately. The concept is the point - yours gets built around how Fairlight runs.
Hire an AI Employee
Not a chatbot. The recording below is the team-facing assistant inside one of those client systems: plain English in, live data out. Swap the questions for yours - how much has this client got in the fund, any redemptions this month, what did they hold six months ago - and that is your accounts team answering ten fewer questions a day.
And One for the Outside World
A second kind faces outward: answering, qualifying and booking around the clock on the channels your contacts already use. Always personal, always personalised, and built inside whatever compliance boundary your funds have to respect.
03What We Build
What It Replaces
Your spreadsheets
The weekly ritual retired - live figures on one screen, one version of the truth.
Your notepads and group chats
Every enquiry, message and decision captured in the system, not in someone's pocket.
The CRM nobody opens
Clients, pipeline and follow-ups where the work actually happens - with the chasing automated.
Your missed follow-ups
Dormant leads, unbilled hours, unanswered quotes - surfaced and chased by an engine that never forgets.
Your paper forms
Onboarding, sign-offs and inductions - digital, signed, filed automatically.
The month-end surprise
Margins, money and risk visible on the day, not discovered when the accountant calls.
The agency invoice
A website your staff edit like a document and publish themselves. No developer wait.
We replace, augment or add around what you already run. Nothing you trust gets ripped out.
04The Proof
Live in Real Businesses Today
Nothing in this deck is a concept. A £13M roofing group runs 81 live projects through their system, margins flagged daily, down from 359 chaotic boards. A £40M contractor had 1,177,240 files mapped and priced before we quoted their migration. A luxury travel operator had 300 pages rebuilt byte-exact, with 6,866 members rescued, when their old platform was switched off.
100+
Live deployments in client businesses
19
Client businesses, named on our site
1,320
AI build sessions this year
You are not buying a promise. You are buying systems that already work.
05The Method
How It Works: One Step at a Time
Cold Lava BuildsThe PromiseYour SideOutcome
- 01Your Side
The Discovery Call
You tell us how the business actually runs. We show you a system like yours running live.
- 02Cold Lava Builds
The Operational Map
We diagnose the business with the same hands that build it - where the hours go, what eats the week, where the pressure sits.
- 03The Promise
The Roadmap
Biggest time savers first: the low-hanging fruit, what gives you the most back, the systems that drive revenue. You always know what is being built and why.
- 04Cold Lava Builds
Built, Bespoke
Not configured, not templated - built around how your operation actually works.
- 05The Promise
Shown Working, Live
The moment a build is ready - mid-month if it is ready mid-month - you watch it run on your real work. Not a slide, not a demo environment.
- 06Your Side
Your Team Signs It Off
Each build is approved by your people before we move to the next. Nothing you trust is switched off until its replacement is live.
- 07Outcome
The System Grows
On to the next thing on the roadmap - building, automating and advising as the system compounds. The backlog is yours to reorder any time.
One step at a time, biggest time savers first - until the repetitive work is built out of your business.
The Three-Month Trial
Every Engagement Starts With a Trial That Works Both Ways
Our recommended structure is a three-month trial. It gives us enough time to deliver, enough time to understand how we work together, and it works both ways: at the end, either of us can walk away. No lock-in. Everything we build is yours from day one.
A defined exit, every build shown working on your real work, and nothing held hostage.
06AI Employees
Round-the-Clock Team Members, Built Around Your Business
Not chatbots. AI employees designed around how each business runs - answering the enquiry, chasing the document, filing the paperwork at 3am. Below is a selection from live client systems: a glimpse, not the catalogue.
What They Handle
- Every inbound enquiry answered and qualified, 24/7, on the channels your customers already use
- An AI recruiter that interviews candidates, chases documents and files them around the clock
- Social publishing hands-free: 1,556 posts and 220,000 impressions for one client while the manager got their week back
- New-starter inductions taken from paper to digital - drawn signature, PDF filed automatically
Where the Line Sits
- Judgement stays human - your team can step into any conversation at any point
- Every message logged in the system, visible to your team the moment it happens
- A team-facing assistant answers plain-English questions from your live data
- We make your people more powerful. We won't pretend the goal is replacing them.
A selection, not the catalogue
Sales
Asks first
LinkedIn Outreach
Connection requests and follow-ups in your voice, personalised from what each prospect actually posts. Warmed up gradually - you approve the pace.
Customer-facing
Runs alone
Voice & Chat Front Desk
High-volume basic enquiries never hit call time. Bookings happen while your team is on other work. Routes only the qualified ones to a human.
Operator UX
Runs alone
In-system Assistant
Ask the system a question in plain English. It answers from your live data. Tell it to do something. It does it after confirmation.
Workforce
Runs alone
Recruitment Intake
New candidates open a custom intake link, run a full eligibility check, upload their documents, and land in the system before a human has spoken to them.
Workforce
Asks first
Allocation Engine
Top-N worker offer based on rules you set. First claim wins. Full audit trail of who saw what, when.
Compliance
Runs alone
Compliance Engine
Every active job, every active worker, checked against your rules every day. Your team stops carrying the regulations in their heads.
Operations
Runs alone
Pipeline Board
Every job, every stage, every change. On one board your team can drag, filter, and sort. Stage transitions trigger the next step automatically.
Data
Runs alone
Live Data Tracker
Markets, government feeds, indices. Pulled, parsed, and surfaced inside your system without anyone refreshing a tab.
Data
Runs alone
Document Ingestion
Parses the worksheets, reports, and statements your business already receives. Turns them into structured records you can sort, filter, and trigger from.
The repetitive work runs alone. The judgement stays yours.
07Commercial Control
Run the Business From One Screen
Projects, people, money and risk in one place - live during the day, not discovered at month end.
What You See
- Who is where, what shipped, what is stuck - across every live job
- Margins flagged daily: one £13M roofing group went from 359 chaotic project boards to 81 live projects with margins and approvals on one screen
- Live figures pulled from the tools you already run - one client's sales command centre went live in a single build day
What Stops Happening
- Rekeying the same numbers into spreadsheets that disagree with each other
- Money you already earned going missing: for one client we found 1,249 dormant leads sitting idle and built the engine to bring them back
- Finding out at month end what you needed to know on Tuesday
The dashboard is not a report. It is where the business runs.
08Ownership
It's Your System. Not Ours.
Every password, every login, every line of code: yours from day one. If we vanished tomorrow, it all keeps running.
Yours From Day One
- The code, the logins, the data - handed over as they are built, not held hostage
- Everything built in the three-month trial is yours, whichever way you decide at the end
- Your data is never pooled with other businesses, never sold, never used to train anything outside your walls
Built Around What Works
- We replace, augment or add around what you already run
- Whatever else your operation runs on, we wire it in
- Nothing you trust gets switched off until its replacement is live and signed off
Ask the last company that sold you software for the same promise.
Straight Answers
Ask Us the Hard Questions
By this point in any serious conversation there are five questions in the room, asked or not. We would rather answer them before you ask.
01
How long is this actually going to take?
The low-hanging fruit lands first, and every build is shown working live on your real work the moment it is ready - then we move to the next thing on the roadmap. Your side of it is a short call a month. We do the rest.
02
We tried AI before and it didn't stick. Why would this be different?
Because nothing we build is templated or configured. It is built around how your business actually runs, shown working on your real work, and nothing is switched off until its replacement is live and your team has signed it off.
03
Is this going to replace my team?
No. The repetitive work runs alone: chasing, logging, reminders, filing. Judgement stays human, your people can step into any conversation at any point, and we make them more powerful. We won't pretend otherwise.
04
Do I still own everything if you disappear?
You do. The code, the logins, the data: in your name from day one. If we vanished tomorrow, it all keeps running - and your data leaves with you.
05
What about the tools we already use?
We replace, augment or add around what you already run. Whatever your operation runs on, we wire it in - nothing you trust gets ripped out.
Whoever you talk to about AI for your business, ask them these same five questions.
09Who Does the Work
So Who Actually Does the Work?
Cold Lava builds for owner-run, operations-heavy businesses. The people on the call are the people who build the system - and the team spans the UK, Europe, Bali and Tunisia, so building never stops for a time zone.
01
Oliver Tatler
Technical Lead & Build Architect
Leads every build on Cold Lava's production line. Custom systems for how you work, not how Silicon Valley thinks you should.
02
Jacob Stray
AI Strategy & Architecture Lead
Turns how the business actually runs into what gets built. The person who maps your operation is the person who architects the system.
03
Cold Lava Engineering
Engineers & AI Specialists
Engineers, AI specialists and automation consultants behind every engagement - the bench behind the 100+ deployments already live.
Working With Us
One Way to Work. One Way to Start.
01
The Monthly Retainer
A standing tech team working through your roadmap - biggest time savers first, every build shown working live before we move to the next. Pick your pace, from a light-touch retainer to your own embedded tech department. The same team at every tier, and everything built is yours from day one.
01
£1,000/mo
Foundation
The starting rhythm, with strategy and automation consulting included from day one.
02
£2,000/mo
Momentum
The same team with more of its time. Things start compounding.
Most clients start here
£4,000/mo
Resident
Adds business-process consulting, included. The pace most working systems get built at.
The fastest pace
£8,000/mo
Scale
Your own tech department. Where enterprise clients often start, to implement faster.
Happy to start wherever suits. Paying more does not buy a better job - every tier gets the same team to the same standard. It just means things move faster. Prices + VAT.
We have had the conversation - this is the proposal that follows it. The next step is the operational map: we take what you send us, find the low-hanging fruit and the pain points, and come back with where we would start.
- 01Send over the list from the call: the systems you run, what you use each one for, and what a unified dashboard should show you
- 02Add the three biggest repetitive time-eaters in the day to day - the quick wins usually hide there
- 03We map the operation and come back with the low-hanging fruit, the pain points, and the roadmap
- 04Pick a pace, start the three-month trial, and watch the first system land on your real work
Send the list over. We will take it from there.
Want the full picture? Explore coldlava.ai