ABOUT
I'm Steve Dalley. I help businesses figure out what to automate, then I build it.
Almost everyone who does this leads with a tool. They're the Zapier person, or the Make person, or the AI person, and your business gets shaped to fit whatever they already know. I work the other way around. I listen to how your work actually moves, find where it's costing you, and then recommend what I'd do about it. Sometimes that's a build. Sometimes it's fixing one broken step before you spend a dollar automating anything.
That's the whole idea behind Teton Summit, my workflow- automation practice. Process expertise over tool expertise. I listen and then recommend.
What “process first” actually means
You can automate a broken process. It just doesn't save you anything. The mess you didn't clean up moves into the automation, where it's harder to see and more expensive to fix. So before I build, I map how the work really crosses from one person or system to the next, and we clean up what's broken. Then I find the few spots where automating actually helps. You end up automating less, and what you automate holds.
AI or automation? It depends, and that's the point
There's a lot of pressure right now to put AI on everything. A lot of the time, rule-based automation does the job faster, cheaper, and more reliably, and nobody needs a model to move a row of data from one place to another. I save AI for the work that genuinely needs reason and judgment. Knowing which is which is most of what you're paying for.
How I measure it
I'd rather show you the work than promise you a number. ROI gets measured during the build, not sold to you before it. I won't claim a win I didn't earn, and I'll tell you up front when adding structure carries its own cost, because sometimes it does and you should know that going in.
The tools I work in
Make.com, Adobe Workfront Fusion, GoHighLevel, ClickUp, Airtable, Zapier, and Shopify. That list will keep changing, which is fine. The tools are interchangeable. The judgment about which one fits your work is not.
If your business depends on a handful of tools that don't quite talk to each other, or on one person remembering how it all connects, that's exactly the kind of thing I like to dig into. Tell me what's slowing you down and I'll tell you where I'd start.