ViperIT
0452 202 109 Book an audit

Case study · Pawley · dog accessories, Brisbane

One person. A full-time job. A brand in 30 countries.

Pawley is a premium dog harness brand William started from zero, with no background in online retail, while working full time. The first year was the hard way. Now the admin runs itself, and this page shows how.

0+countries shipped to, from Australia and a warehouse partner overseas
0+orders a month, and growing month on month
0currencies, priced and repriced automatically
0employees. No agency, no bookkeeper, no VA

The problem every small business has

A growing business makes admin faster than it makes money. Orders need packing slips, customers need answers, ads need checking, the books need reconciling, suppliers need chasing. The usual fix is to hire someone, and the first hire eats most of the margin.

Pawley took the other path. Every recurring piece of admin was handed to automation, with a person approving the parts that matter. The result is a business that grew from a handful of orders a month to over a hundred without adding a single wage.

A normal week, automated

Orders and stockOrders flow to the right place automatically: Brisbane for Australia and New Zealand, the warehouse partner for everywhere else. Stock levels, product data and prices in nine currencies are managed through the store's own API, not by hand.
Customer emailsSize questions, exchanges, "where's my order". The AI drafts the reply with the order details already looked up. A person reads it, tweaks it if needed, and sends. Nothing goes to a customer unseen.
Ad reviewEvery ad is checked against a written set of rules: spend, return, cost per sale. The output is a short verdict list, keep, cut or scale, not a dashboard to stare at. Decisions take minutes.
The numbersSales, ad spend, product cost, postage. Profit for the month, and the month projected forward, pulled live from the store and the ad account. The question "how did we go?" has a number, not a feeling.
Business reviewA sit-down where the AI has already read everything. What sold, what didn't, where the cart leaks, what to do next. Like a team meeting, without the team. Decisions get written down and followed up.
Finance and adminCosts ledger rebuilt from receipts. Director loans reconciled. Supplier orders sized from real sell-through. Insurance re-quoted. The jobs that usually wait until tax time get done when they come up.

What it replaced

FunctionWhat a business this size usually paysAt Pawley
BookkeeperA few hundred a month, quarterly surprisesLedger and reconciliations run from receipts and bank exports. Reviewed, not typed.
Ads managementAgency retainer, or hours a week of guessingWeekly rules-based review, verdicts in minutes, changes approved by a person.
Customer serviceA part-timer or a VADrafted with the order already looked up. Approved and sent by a person.
Operations adminThe owner's eveningsStock, pricing, routing and supplier orders handled through the store's API.
AnalystNobody. Small businesses don't have one.Profit, conversion and cohort questions answered the same day, with the working shown.

The rules it runs on

This is the part that matters more than the AI. Pawley's automation works because the rules are written down and the approvals are built in.

  • Nothing reaches a customer or spends money without a person approving it. Every email, every ad change, every refund.
  • Every decision has a written rule. Ad kill and scale thresholds, reorder triggers, pricing uplifts per market. The AI applies them. The owner changes them.
  • Everything is logged. What was checked, what was decided, why. When something looks wrong, the answer is a search away.
  • The owner owns it all. The store, the accounts, the code, the documents. No agency holds the keys.

What it costs to run

AI usage for a business this size is less than a coffee a day. The store and ad platform subscriptions would exist anyway. The expensive part was the year of learning, and that's the part you don't have to repeat, because it's what we set up for you.

The AI isn't the point. The point is that one person can run it.William, founder of Pawley and Viper IT

Your version of this

Pawley is an online store, so its automation is about orders and ads. A trade business is about quotes and invoices. A clinic is about bookings and reminders. The shape is the same: find the admin that lands on the owner, write the rules, build the system, keep a person on the approvals.

It starts with a half-day audit, $1,500, credited against your first build.

Book an auditSee what we build
Call Book an audit