Your business still runs on people remembering things. That's the part we fix.
Cobus van Vuuren works with business owners and executive teams to find where time gets lost, leads go cold and decisions wait on one person. Each leak gets a cost. Then the ones worth fixing get fixed. Sometimes that's AI. Often it's a process nobody wrote down.
A note from Cobus
You've hired good people. You've bought the software. The same things still slip.
You've probably tried the obvious fixes already. Someone on the team uses ChatGPT. There's a CRM nobody fully trusts. And still the enquiry waits until Thursday, the monthly report gets built by hand, and one person is the reason a process works at all.
That's rarely a people problem. When two different people keep missing the same step, the step is the problem.
You probably don't need more AI. You need someone to look at how the work moves, decide what deserves fixing first, and say plainly what doesn't.
Cobus
Where to start
Three ways in
Bring Cobus in as your consultant
For a specific problem: a process that's breaking as you grow, an AI decision that needs making properly, or a team doing too much by hand. Scoped around the outcome you need, not hours on a timesheet.
How consulting works →Free · 5 minutesAI Readiness Diagnostic
See where your business stands across four systems, and where to look first. Results on screen straight away, with a copy by email.
Take the diagnostic →For teams and eventsSpeaking
A practical talk on where AI helps a business and where it's theatre, available for leadership teams, associations and business groups.
Ask about a talk →Owner-run business wanting a fixed-scope start?See the Business Systems Assessment →
How it works
Four steps. The tool comes last.
Understand
How the business really runs, in your words. Who does what, where work waits, what still has to go through the owner.
Map and cost
Every leak gets a number: time at real rates, leads that go cold, work done twice. Now they can be compared.
Prioritise
Every change lands on two people: the client paying you, and the person doing the work. The changes that help both go first. The rest gets budgeted plainly, parked, or cancelled.
Build or hand over
We build what's worth building, or hand your team a plan they can run. Either way, it's yours.
Sometimes the answer is "don't automate this yet". A process needs fixing, a role needs defining, or a price needs correcting first.
From the work
What the work turned up
Six systems, one enquiry.
A gutter installation business ran every job through six systems that didn't talk to each other. A single job got typed up to three times before the quote went out. Mapping it showed which steps were mechanical, which needed judgement, and that the monthly profit reconciliation alone took about a week.
The two-hour test.
37 of the 60 owners who answered this in our diagnostic said a new enquiry doesn't get a real reply within two hours unless they step in.
AI that didn't need to be there.
A daily automated task called an AI model every time it ran. The work was purely mechanical. Rebuilt without it, the monthly cost went to zero and the run time dropped from about two minutes to fourteen seconds.
The same thinking, applied to marketing.
Through RhinoBerry, Cobus's marketing agency: organic clicks up 79% in the 28 days after a schema and page-title rewrite, for a security group operating in seven countries. And Google Ads leads at R39.68 against an R80 target over four weeks, for a weight-loss coaching business.
See what we've built, and what each system has been tested on →
About
Finance. Marketing. Now AI. Systems all the way through.
Cobus van Vuuren started in finance: he studied towards CA, then worked as a financial manager in corporate until 2017. That's why every change gets costed before it's built, and why marketing has to show a return. He has consulted since 2017, first on SEO and growth, and founded RhinoBerry, a marketing agency, in 2019. Running it meant doing every manual process first, then turning the repetitive parts into systems. The methods he uses with clients are the ones running his own business.
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Your next move
Got a problem that keeps coming back?
Tell Cobus what's happening. You'll get a straight answer on whether it's a systems problem, an AI problem, or neither.