Operations, automation and AI · Wilmington, North Carolina

You don't have a messy business. You have a business that outgrew its systems.

I find where your business is leaking time and leads, then I build the thing that stops it.

5+

Hours a week clients get back

300+

Automated workflows built

150+

Platforms connected

10+

Years in operations

A familiar feeling

Sound like your Tuesday?

You bought Zapier months ago. You have logged in all of once.

You retype the same name, email and phone number into three tools. Every day.

Someone asked ChatGPT for a business like yours. You have no idea if you came up.

That is not disorganization. That is a business that outgrew its setup.

Start free

Two free ways to see your gaps.

No call required. No spam. Just a real read on where you stand.

Ops fix · free · 5 minutes

The 5-Minute Ops Quiz

6 questions. Honest answers. A real score.

  • Your operations health score (out of 30)
  • Section-by-section breakdown
  • The fixes matched to your weak spots
  • Instant score, no waiting.
Start the free quiz
Visibility · free · up to 25 pages

The AI Visibility Scan

Drop your URL. See if AI can find you.

  • Your AEO / GEO / SEO visibility score
  • Whether ChatGPT and Google can actually read you
  • The gaps costing you AI-search referrals
  • Your fastest wins, ranked
Get my free scan
Looking out from under a pier on the North Carolina coast

The difference

A human doing the work. Not a dashboard telling you what's broken.

Everything is a dashboard now. Another score, another red number, another tab you stop opening by week three. I am not sending you a report about your business. I go in and fix the thing the report would have pointed at.

Enter a lead's information one time and every path has an automatic next step. Booked and serious, straight into onboarding. No-showed, auto follow-up with a reschedule link. Not a fit, polite close, logged, done. Not with more tools. With the right connections between the ones you already have.

The real math

Five hours a week isn't five hours.

Five is the floor, not the average. It's the least I have ever found buried in a business, and I have looked at a lot of them.

Five hours a week is 20 hours a month. Here is what that is actually worth.

For an insurance broker, that is over a thousand renewal calls a year that nobody made. At fifteen minutes each, it's your entire book, twice.

For a chiropractor, it's 500 more patient visits a year, or the membership program you keep meaning to launch. I built one of those for a practice, and it runs with almost no admin time each month.

For a coach, it's five hours aimed at follow-ups, sales calls, sharpening your client experience, training your team, or finally crafting the marketing plan you keep pushing. The big picture, instead of the paperwork and scheduling and busywork that keeps pulling you off it.

Now run the real numbers

Say you charge $4,000 a client. You get those 20 hours back and you put them where they belong: follow-up, nurture, actually pitching.

Close one. You've covered the Get Found build more than twice over.

Close two. You've paid for the full site-plus-system build, the one that starts at $5,500, and you're $2,500 up.

Close one a week. That's $16,000 a month against a one-time build. Every month after the first one is just yours.

Your number's probably different. Run yours. The shape doesn't change.

If your gut reaction is "I can't afford this yet"...

consider what those hours are actually worth pointed at revenue instead of your admin work.

EVERYONE has five hours a week sitting in work that could be handed off, automated, or deleted outright. The inbox you triage twice a day. Chasing signatures on forms. Expense reports. The four emails it takes to book one meeting with three people in it. Paperwork that exists because it has always existed.

Most of it can be automated and most owners have no idea, because you don't know what you don't know. That's the entire reason to hire someone who's already been inside 150+ platforms and wired 300+ automations between them. Finding the five hours is the easy part of my job.

And if I look at your business and there isn't five hours in there, I'll tell you. You're in a good spot, I'll automate whatever is worth automating, and we're done. No retainer you did not need, no being talked into a bigger project.

I really loved working with Erin. I have two people doing her job now, which makes sense because she just offered a significantly broader set of skills than most.

Lindsay M.

Former Client

Very organized, very systems oriented, and just brilliant. Even being in a conversation with Erin, I'm already learning all sorts of things, and the minute I implement, I'm like, why the hell haven't I been doing this?

Bri

Marketing Partner

Erin created a wonderful website for my small town bar. Simple yet stylish and packed with information. Incredibly easy to work with, great communication, and she made sure every function and link worked. I highly recommend her services.

Kaurie

Bar Owner

What an absolute treat. My head is spinning and that's a great thing. I feel so much better about my day to day. I'm so excited and I know she just scratched the surface. I can't thank you enough!

Chris

Fit

Who I work with, and who I don't.

We'll get along great if you:

  • You can feel the gap (lost leads, six tools, fuzzy on what converts) but cannot point to where it leaks
  • You hand over logins and collateral fast, because you want it handled
  • You trust a process instead of white-knuckling every step
  • You are open to changing how things work, not just bolting automation onto a mess

We're probably not a fit if you:

  • You have rigid systems you will not budge on (I can build it, but it comes out duct-taped, and neither of us wants that)
  • You want a button-pusher, not a system (that is a VA, and that is a different hire)
  • You mainly need paid ads and media buying run day to day (I build the funnel they land in, I just don't run the ads)

In that last bucket? I've got trusted specialists I'll point you to. Right person, faster result, no hard feelings. That is just how this works.


One machine, three stages

Get Found. Catch It. Keep It.

More leads won't save you. Pouring rice into a strainer just loses it faster.

Getting clients is one machine with three stages: they find you, they become a lead, they stay. Most people patch one stage and wonder why the business still leaks. I build all three, because a strainer with holes doesn't get better when you pour harder.

Not everything here is a big build. Some of it is one time and done, some is worth me sticking around for, and plenty of it is an afternoon of work. I'll tell you which one you actually need, and honestly, it's often the small one.

150+ platforms, 300+ automations wired between them, including Asana, HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Zapier, Make, Notion, Google Workspace, Stripe, Calendly and Claude. The gaps are usually in the seams, which is exactly where I look first.

The work

Things I built that kept working.

Real businesses, real numbers, and what actually changed after.

Hospitality

Built in 2023. Still growing three years later.

My first client after launching Coastal. A small-town bar with no website and no way to be found outside of word of mouth. I built it, handed it over, and left.

1,569

Visits in 2025

+56%

Year over year

496

From Google

Healthcare & Wellness

A membership program running on sticky notes.

No offer structure, no enrollment flow, and no way to track who had actually paid. I built all three and wired them into one thing that runs without anyone touching it.

4

Systems merged into one

0

Manual admin hours

6 weeks

To full launch

Erin Cronin, founder of The Coastal Collaborative

Meet Erin

Part Ops nerd, part detective.

Ten years inside other people's operations, 300+ automated workflows wired across 150+ platforms. Give me two systems that both work fine and flatly refuse to talk to each other, and finding the seam is the part I actually enjoy.

You stop typing the same details into three places. And when something breaks at 9pm, the person who built it is the person who answers.

Asana Certified ProAnthropic and Google AI trainedMore about me

Trained across Anthropic's Academy catalog (Claude, Claude Code, Cowork, agent skills, subagents, and MCP) plus Google AI Essentials.

Quick answers

Common questions, straight answers.

Getting clients is one machine with three stages, and I build all three. Get Found: AEO, GEO, and SEO so AI and Google actually recommend you. Catch It: websites, funnels, and opt-ins built so every click becomes a real lead. Keep It: CRM, onboarding, nurture, and automation so one yes becomes a client for life. Whatever it takes so your business runs without you holding it all together.

A VA executes the tasks you give them. I figure out which tasks should not exist in the first place, then build the systems that handle the rest. VAs handle work. I eliminate it. Most small businesses need both eventually. If you are picking where to start, you probably need me first.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity to recommend a business like yours, AI can only suggest sites it can actually read. Most sites are not built for that, so they are invisible to it. I add the structure that fixes it: llms.txt, schema markup, and an AI-readable FAQ, so you show up as the answer instead of your competitor. The free AI Visibility Scan tells you exactly where you stand right now.

Both free tools cost nothing. From there: the Full Visibility Dashboard is $297 (a scored dashboard across AEO, GEO, and SEO, with page-by-page findings and every fix ranked by impact) and the Operations Audit is $597 (I go through your business like a real customer would, then walk you through every leak and what I'd fix first). Get Found (AEO, GEO, SEO) is priced by how many pages need changes: $1,500 up to 10 pages, $2,400 up to 25, from $3,600 for bigger or messier, with Visibility Care at $797/month afterward if you want it kept up. Websites start at $2,500 for a Coastal Starter build, up to $5,500 for Site + System with booking, payments, and CRM wired in. Site Care is $397/month for hosting, updates, security, visibility monitoring, and small changes. Ongoing systems and automation retainers start at $1,500/month.

Two cases, really. If you won't budge on how things work, I can build it, but it comes out duct-taped, and neither of us wants that. And if what you really need is someone running paid ads (Meta, Google, the daily bid-and-creative grind), that's a different specialist and I'll happily point you to the right one. I build the funnel the ads land in. I just don't run the ads. Right person, faster result.

Ready when you are

What would you actually do if you got your time back?

I'll find you five hours a week. If I cannot, I'll tell you that instead.

Step 1

We talk this week.

Twenty to thirty minutes. No pitch, no proposal. If someone else is a better fit, I'll tell you and point you to them.

Step 2

Scope and price in 48 hours.

In writing, approved by you before anything starts. If the work grows later, that is a conversation, not a surprise invoice.

Step 3

I start building.

No two builds are the same, so the timeline is quoted with the scope rather than promised up front. If the first thing I hand you isn't right, you don't pay for it and we stop there.