Small business owners: Hand the busywork to AI.
You started a business to do the work you are good at. Now half your week goes to follow-ups, quotes, invoices, scheduling, and copying numbers between apps. We build AI that does that work inside the apps you already use, and we keep it running.
Book your call: 30 minutes with William Dorman, the founder.
Same business. A different day.
Follow one owner through an ordinary Tuesday, with the busywork handed to AI.
- 7:02 am: Twelve visits, confirmed before coffee. You used to text every customer from the driveway. Now each one gets a reminder with their arrival window, and the one who needs Thursday is moved without a call.
- 8:14 am: A call you couldn't take. You're on the highway. That lead would normally call the next company on the list. Instead it's called back in two minutes and booked.
- 10:05 am: The invoice you'd chase on Sunday. Invoice 1042 is three weeks late. The second reminder goes out with a pay link, and it's paid before lunch.
- 1:47 pm: Up a ladder. Booked by 1:48. A homeowner's AC dies and they text you. Your AI answers in nine seconds, offers Marco's 3:30 slot, and books it.
- 6:30 pm: Home for dinner. Twenty-three things handled today. Two needed you, and you did them from your phone in a minute. Nothing is waiting.
Four places the busywork hides.
On the call we go through all four with you, then name the one to automate first.
- Getting customers. Leads come in from your site, your inbox, and your phone, and the follow-up depends on you remembering. AI can answer, qualify, and follow up the same day.
- Quoting and getting paid. Quotes, invoices, and payment reminders get written by hand, and late. AI can draft them from the job and chase what is owed.
- Running the work. Scheduling, reminders, and status updates eat the hours between jobs. AI can keep the calendar and the customer up to date.
- Knowing your numbers. Your numbers are spread across apps, so you rarely look. AI can pull them into one place every day, with each number traced to where it came from.
What your morning could look like.
Every business we work for gets a dashboard of what its AI did, with every number traced to the app it came from. Pick a business like yours. These are demo businesses with sample data. The demo businesses: a heating & air company; a cleaning company; a landscaping company; a online store.
One call, then the work comes off your plate.
- Book a call. Thirty minutes. You walk us through how the business runs and where your week goes.
- We build it. We build the automation on Apiary, our own software, connected to the apps you already use. Nothing to switch.
- It runs. It does the work every day. We watch it, fix it when something changes, and then find the next piece to take off your plate.
We have done this inside real companies.
Before Apiary, Black Lily did this work by hand. The finished project with real numbers behind it: AI document processing and catalog restructuring for a Permian Basin industrial supplier: raw paper to ERP-ready data in five business days. Raw paper to ERP-ready structured data in five business days. The team went from flipping through a paper price book on every lookup to a clean, searchable catalog inside the system they already use daily.
Every automation we build runs on Apiary.
Apiary is the software we are building: AI that learns a business, then runs it. It connects to the apps a business runs on and builds a model of how it actually runs. Your automations start from that model, not from a template.
- Works with the apps you have. An official connector where an app has one. Where it does not, a browser agent learns the app once and reads it every day.
- Read-only until we let it act. A guard on every outbound connection refuses anything that would change another system until we choose to let it act.
- Every number traced. Everything Apiary reads goes into a ledger that is never edited, so every number it shows traces back to its source.
You talk to the person who builds it.
William Dorman founded Black Lily in 2025. He sells, builds, and does the client work himself, so the person on the call is the person who builds your automation.
What you leave the call with
- A plain map of where your week goes.
- The one piece of work to automate first, and why that one.
- What it would take to build, and how long.
- A straight answer if AI is not the fix.
Questions owners ask before they book.
- Who is this for?
- Small business owners whose week is eaten by repeat work: follow-ups, quotes, invoices, scheduling, reporting. If you or your team do the same task the same way every week, it is probably a fit.
- What happens on the call?
- You walk William through how the business runs and where your hours go. He tells you what AI can take over now, what it cannot, and what he would build first.
- Do I have to change the apps I use?
- No. Apiary connects to the apps you already run on: through an official connector where one exists, otherwise through a browser agent that learns the app once.
- Is my data safe?
- Apiary reads from your apps, and a guard on every outbound connection refuses anything that would change another system until we choose to let it act. The agents that learn an app never see a password.
- What does it cost?
- It depends on what we build. You get a price after the call, before any work starts.
- What if AI is not the answer?
- Then we tell you on the call.
Start with one piece of your business.
Book 30 minutes. Bring the one task you would hand off first. Book a call · cal.com/black-lily/30min · (432) 234-3779
Black Lily is an AI automation agency for small businesses, building on Apiary: AI that learns a business, then runs it. Founded by William Dorman, Founder & CEO.
Blog: writing by William Dorman for small business owners.