We believe small certification businesses have big advantages right now

People aren't calling me asking for software that their admin has to learn and spend their days clicking around in. They're asking, isn't there software that can do the clicking?

We believe smaller certification businesses have big advantages right now. You can build a system in place of your next hire, use the time that frees up to be the certifier your customers can actually call, and change how you work faster than any larger office can.

What does the clicking

The thing that does the clicking is called an agentic organisation. In a certification business it means building systems that do most of the administrative work we see in firms today: moving information through the business, bringing it to the attention of the right people at the right time, identifying issues and highlighting them, and otherwise moving projects forward the way an office does currently. It's really just automating what an administrator does now.

Right now, it is more possible than ever to build systems that do this work. Starting this way, AI native, is an advantage, and I don't think it will last as businesses adapt to newer technology.

Build instead of hire

Once a small business gets busy, the first instinct is to hire. It's still the right instinct, but who or what to hire has become different.

For small businesses at the stage of a first hire, or an additional hire, the opportunity is there to look at what agentic organisation you could build into your business, just within the budget you would have set aside for that person.

Think about what that person would actually do all day. Chasing missing or unsigned documents. Checking the submitted documents for the basics, like addresses, creation dates and signatures. And staying on top of which projects should be the priority, because they're complete enough to approve today. That's work an agent can do.

The advantages are obvious. Once you've built it, those particular jobs stop needing someone hired or trained for them. And the people already in your organisation can move up the value chain, perhaps marketing the business rather than copying and pasting all day.

Be the certifier people can call

Once those jobs are handled, you're the one who can pick up the phone. For certifiers running small businesses, your focus has to be on customer service. It has to be remaining available to answer questions from clients.

As a customer of certifiers, I know the ability to call my certifier was the make or break of who I chose to send my projects to. And I didn't want to go through a reception desk. I wanted direct access to you, the person who can advise what you will and won't accept.

The more admin you can move off your plate, the more energy you have for customer service.

Not every business suits it

But not every certification business is perfect for adapting to an agentic workflow. The ones that are ideal have an extremely narrow focus. Sheds, for instance.

Picture a shed building company coming to your website, filling in an intake form, and having the submission reviewed then and there. It takes payment and creates the project. It starts checking the registers for licences and pulls the property reports, and it highlights the areas that need your attention. Because you've built the process, and you run a lean business, you can offer an approval time frame guarantee at a competitive price. That puts you in a better position than most general certifiers, who aren't interested in a little shed job anyway.

The niche doesn't really matter, there are plenty within the certification industry.

It not only makes your approval process easier to adapt to an agentic workflow, it makes your sales effort easier. You know exactly who you need to be building relationships with, what events you need to be at, and whose charity golf day to attend. You also know exactly who you're speaking to when you put together your social media: the shed builder.

You might not want to stay small

Staying small isn't for everyone, and it has real risks. If you are the business, you're also the bottleneck. When you're sick or away, the system stops without your input, unless you've fully handed decision making over to your agentic system. A niche can dry up, which is why, as soon as you have one working, you start on another. And a small office has a ceiling on how much work it can take on. Some certifiers want to grow, take on bigger projects and build a firm, and that's a fair thing to want.

Larger firms have something a small office can't offer. Large and complicated projects need a team to deliver them, and so do volume builders, or any company with a truly large pipeline of new work. They'll want to see capacity that a small business couldn't provide. That isn't a negative, it's something to weigh when you choose your niche. Will your customers buy from a business your size?

Small is nimble

It's actually very hard to move an existing team to a new process. I have a friend who's a management consultant. He was engaged by a funded tech company of about 40 people, and after three months not a single agent had been deployed. The reason? Humans. Either not wanting to adapt or outright dismissive of what could be achieved. He was joking, I think, but one solution floated was to sack the entire team and rehire on the condition that the new systems be adhered to. If tech companies are having a hard time adapting - how long will it take large certification businesses?

In a one- or two-person office there's no team to bring along. There's only one or two people's preferences and processes to build for.

In our onboarding, we spend hours in certifiers' offices, talking through their processes step by step, working out how information needs to be provided by the client and how it can be reviewed and documents created by AI processes, before we build anything. When there's one person in the room, there's only one version of the process to write down. It's something that can be assessed and built for in a month, a larger business can't move that fast.

We do the same

We at ApprovIQ practise what we preach. We're a deliberately small team that will stay small, and we focus on a niche (you, certifiers and building surveyors, and I can say "you" because nobody else has made it this far). We'll continue to be able to provide better service to the small number of businesses we work with, because we're automating as much of our own work as we can in the same way we can automate yours, which gives us the time to be available to our customers.

See the similarity? We don't need a huge number of customers, just a handful of good ones that will stay with us long term. The same as your business.