A firm whose best channel only works by hand / The problem
Your best channel is the one nobody scales
You already know the letters work. A planning decision lands, the owner is suddenly thinking hard about what happens next, and a letter that arrives that week gets answered. But somebody has to find the decision, work out who owns the building, write the right letter for approved or refused, print it and stamp it. So it happens in bursts, whenever somebody has a quiet week, and the rest go unwritten.
A firm whose best channel only works by hand / What we found
The letter was never the hard part
Mapping it end to end put the difficulty somewhere awkward. Thirty-eight council planning portals, each with its own layout, none of them agreeing on anything. And behind that, the question that decides whether any of it matters: who actually owns this building, and where do you post to. Get the owner wrong and every clever thing upstream is a wasted stamp. Meanwhile the pile of decisions nobody had written to had reached about five thousand.
A firm whose best channel only works by hand / What we built
Decision to doormat, without printing anything
A planning decision now surfaces on its own, gets tested against a tight list of what counts and what does not, resolves an owner and a postal address, and drafts the right letter for approved, refused or newly applied, on the existing letterhead. Nothing is written to twice. A second and third touch schedule themselves and stop the moment somebody responds. Nothing leaves without a tick first.
A firm whose best channel only works by hand / What changed
Built, proven, and not yet posted
This is the honest one. Not a single letter has gone in the post. The chain runs end to end on real planning decisions, the letters render correctly on the real letterhead at between 82p and about a pound each, and the whole thing sits in proof mode where it prints nothing, posts nothing and charges nothing. What is missing is not code. It is an owner-data subscription, a CRM token and credit on the print account. Roughly five thousand letters are queued behind that switch.
0 postedLetters actually in the post so far. Everything between a council planning decision and the doormat is built and proven end to end; the hold-up is three accounts, not code.
A firm whose best channel only works by hand / Whose it was
A London property firm, one switch from live
A property acquisition and agency business across London and the Home Counties, the same one behind the instant appraisal tool. The channel this automates already works when done by hand, at a return the owner puts at roughly six to one, though that is his own figure for his own manual mailings and nothing built here has measured it. Going live needs three accounts turned on, not more building.
See the operations suite Book a call
All fourteen stories · MAX.AI · 2026