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Nobody buys an automation because the workflow canvas looks cool. They buy it because you show them a number: 'this task costs you $2,700 a year and my automation makes that cost go away.' The formula is embarrassingly simple — minutes per run, times runs per month, times the hourly cost of the person doing it, divided by 60 — but almost no freelancer bothers to compute it, which is why so many automation pitches die at 'that's neat.' A concrete dollar figure turns a nice-to-have into a line item the owner can compare against your price. This number is the pricing anchor for everything you sell in this course: if the task costs $225 a month in wages, a $500 build fee that removes it forever is an easy yes.
Here is the math done in full for a real task: an office manager re-types web-form leads into the company CRM. Timing it with a stopwatch (do this for real — people guess low), one lead takes about 6 minutes: open the notification email, copy five fields, create the CRM contact, tag the source, archive the email. The business gets about 90 leads a month. The office manager costs the business about $25 per hour once you include payroll costs on top of wages. So: 6 minutes x 90 runs = 540 minutes a month = 9 hours. 9 hours x $25 = $225 per month, or $2,700 per year, spent re-typing what a machine could move in seconds. Write it exactly like that in a proposal — four lines of arithmetic — and the client can check every step themselves, which is precisely what makes it persuasive.
Two honest caveats that make your numbers credible instead of salesy. First, use the loaded hourly cost, not the raw wage — a $20/hour employee costs the employer roughly $25/hour after payroll taxes and benefits (in the US you can sanity-check occupational wages against the Bureau of Labor Statistics tables). Second, the formula deliberately ignores the value of speed and dropped-lead errors, which are often bigger than the wage cost — mention them, but do not put invented numbers on them. A conservative, checkable figure beats an inflated one every time a skeptical owner reads your proposal.