Business automation in Newquay.
A town that does most of its year’s trade in about four months, with the same number of people handling it. That is the shape of business where removing admin pays for itself in a single season.
Autaimate builds business automation and custom software for Newquay businesses, from a studio in St Austell about twenty minutes away. Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500, typically live in about four weeks. You own the code.
The four-month year
Newquay runs on a curve steeper than almost anywhere else in Cornwall. Hospitality, accommodation, surf schools, attractions and the trades and suppliers that service them do the bulk of their annual trade between May and September, then spend the winter on maintenance and next season’s bookings.
The admin does not scale with the team. In July the enquiries triple, the rota changes daily, and the person handling the paperwork is also on the floor. That is when enquiries go unanswered, deposits get chased late and compliance records slip — not through carelessness, but because there is no slack left anywhere in the week.
The airport and the aerospace activity growing around it have added a second kind of business to the town entirely: technical, year-round and regulated. Different problems, same underlying issue — the software sold to both was designed for somewhere with a head office and a steady workload.
Built for a season, not an average
Four things that consistently break in August and can be fixed over the winter.
Enquiry handling that survives August
An assistant that greets every website visitor, works out what they want and captures the enquiry with a name and a number, texted to your phone within seconds. It answers only from your own confirmed material, so it cannot invent a price or promise availability you have already sold.
Booking and deposit workflows
The join between the booking, the deposit, the confirmation and the sheet you actually work from on the day. Built around how you run a season rather than how a national platform assumes every venue does.
Hospitality compliance
Allergen records, safety checks, temperature logs, training records. Produced as evidence automatically rather than depending on someone remembering to file it before an environmental health visit.
Seasonal staff onboarding
The same induction run forty times between April and June. Turned into something a new starter completes on their own phone, leaving a dated record that proves they did it.
Twenty minutes down the A392
Autaimate is based in St Austell, which puts Newquay close enough that a scoping session is a short drive rather than a day out. For a hospitality build in particular, sitting in during a service and watching where the process actually jams tells us more than any amount of description.
The winter is the right time to do this. Trying to change how a busy venue works in July is how good ideas get abandoned in week two — whereas a build scoped in January is comfortably live and bedded in before Easter.
Mick Stevenson spent four decades in UK construction and trades before writing software. The relevance to a seasonal town is specific: he has worked in businesses where the pressure is real and the tolerance for a clumsy tool is zero. If it takes more than a few taps in the middle of a rush, it will not get used.
Newquay questions
Can something be built before next season? +
Usually, yes. Most commissions take about four weeks, so anything scoped by late winter is live well before Easter. The quiet months are the right time — a build that lands in June competes for attention with the season itself and normally loses.
Will it cope when enquiries triple in July? +
That is the point of it. Software does not get tired in August. An enquiry-capture system handles the fortieth message of the day exactly as it handled the first, which is more than can be said for any of us at that stage of the season.
What does it cost for a seasonal business? +
Commissions start with a £750 scoping session, then run at a fixed price from £8,500. For a Newquay business the honest way to judge that is against one season: if a tool recovers a few hours a week across four months and stops a handful of enquiries going unanswered in August, it has usually paid for itself before September.
We already use a booking platform. Is this worth it? +
Often the useful build is not a replacement but the join — the part your platform does not do, that someone is currently doing by hand between two screens at the end of a shift. Those builds are small, cheap and high value. If reconfiguring what you have would fix it, we will say so instead.
How long before we own it? +
The repository is transferred on delivery, at the end of the build. Code, documentation and deployment configuration. No licence we can revoke, so you are never stuck waiting on us during a season.
Do you work with the aerospace and airport businesses too? +
Yes. That side of the town has a different problem — year-round, technical and regulated, with certification and traceability requirements rather than a seasonal peak. Different build, same approach: scope the actual process first.
Also covering
Scope it this winter. Run it next season.
Tell us which part of August breaks first and we will tell you straight whether it is worth building something for. If it is not, you will hear that too.