AI assessments · London

A shortlist of AI tools
you'll actually use.

A 45-minute call. A report in 48 hours. A four-day plan that reclaims eight hours of your week — built around the tools you're already paying for and the workflows you already run.

Book a 45-minute call → See how it works
§ 01

The problem isn't AI. It's knowing where to start.

Every small business owner I speak with says a version of the same thing. They know AI is changing how businesses operate. They've tried ChatGPT a few times. They've watched the tutorials. They've had sales calls with three different consultants who wanted £20,000 to "transform their operations." And they're still exactly where they started — because what they actually need isn't transformation. It's a shortlist.

A shortlist of four or five specific tools, with specific pricing, in a specific order, that solve specific problems in their specific business. Not a strategy deck. Not a six-month engagement. Not a workshop about the future of work. A list of things they can sign up for on Tuesday and have working by Friday.

That's what this is.

§ 02

How it works

Four steps, five working days, one deliverable. No long engagements, no tier upgrades, no "phase two" you weren't expecting.

01

Book

Pick a 45-minute slot. No sales call first. The booked call is the assessment.

02

Talk

We walk through your business, your week, and where your time is actually going. Structured, but conversational.

03

Receive

Within 48 hours, a report lands in your inbox: recommended tools, costs, a four-day implementation plan, and the financial case for it.

04

Review

We jump on a 30-minute call to walk through the report together, answer questions, and decide what happens next.

§ 03

What you actually receive

  1. Executive summary

    Your biggest pain points, stated plainly, with the specific outcome you'll see if you follow the plan.

  2. Impact vs effort matrix

    Every problem we surface, mapped onto what's worth fixing now versus what can wait. The focus is Quick Wins — high-impact, low-effort moves.

  3. Four recommended tools

    Each one named, priced, and mapped to a specific pain point. With complexity ratings, setup times, and hours saved per week.

  4. A four-day implementation plan

    Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4. Each day is 15–30 minutes of work. Each ends with a working tool.

  5. What comes after

    Three heavier-lift opportunities that would compound on the Quick Wins. No sales pitch — just named opportunities.

  6. The financial case

    Weekly hours returned, monthly value at your effective hourly rate, and a net ROI after tool costs. The number that justifies the whole exercise.

  7. A 30-minute review call

    We walk through the report together. You ask anything you want. No upsell scripts.

"Every business owner I've talked to about AI has said the same thing: I don't need another consultant, I need a list."

What clients actually want, summarised

See a sample report
§ 03b

What a typical assessment uncovers

Three illustrative scenarios that reflect the shape of real assessments. Specific numbers, specific tools, specific outcomes. Real client names will replace these as the founding cohort completes.

Illustrative example

Property management firm, 14 staff

The two directors were spending most of every Monday morning answering tenant questions that already had answers buried in their own FAQ. The plan: a custom GPT trained on the tenancy template and FAQ pack, plus a routing rule that flags anything genuinely urgent to a human. Their inbox went from a daily fire to a passive queue.

6 hrs/week
reclaimed across leadership. Roughly £3,800 of returned operator time per month. First response down from four hours to twelve minutes.
Illustrative example

Independent ecommerce brand, 8 staff

The part-time ops manager was rebuilding the same marketing report by hand every Monday morning, then drowning in returns enquiries by lunchtime. The plan replaced the report with an automated dashboard pulling from the tools already in place, and routed returns through an AI triage step. Mondays stopped being a fire drill.

9 hrs/week
returned to the ops manager. Around £4,200 of operator time recovered per month. Reporting now updates itself overnight.
Illustrative example

B2B services agency, 22 staff

Three separate weekly reports were each being hand-built by a different team lead, and the MD was losing ninety minutes a week reconciling them. The plan consolidated everything into one GPT-built summary that pulls live from the tools the team already use. The leads got an afternoon back. The MD got a single source of truth.

7 hrs/week
reclaimed across leadership. Around £5,100 of returned time per month. MD now reads one report in three minutes instead of writing three.

These are not real client testimonials. They are realistic example scenarios shown until the founding cohort delivers the first batch of named case studies.

§ 04

Pricing

One price, no tiers, no upsell scripts on the follow-up call. If the report surfaces heavier-lift work you'd like help with — custom GPTs, automations, lead-response systems — that's a separate, quoted engagement.

After the cohort fills

The Shortlist Assessment

£600 inc. VAT · fixed fee · delivered in 5 working days
  • 45-minute intake call
  • Tailored report delivered within 48 hours
  • Four-day quick-wins plan
  • Impact-vs-effort matrix for every surfaced issue
  • Financial impact summary in £ returned per month
  • 30-minute review call to walk through the findings
Book a 45-minute call →

Refund offered in full if the report doesn't surface anything genuinely actionable. The bar for "actionable" is yours.

Michael Park, founder of Shortlist
§ 05

About

Shortlist is run by Michael Park, someone who's spent years running small businesses and dealing with the practical realities that come with them: never enough time, repetitive work piling up faster than you can clear it, the same handful of bottlenecks every quarter.

AI didn't show up as a thesis or a research interest; it showed up as a set of problems waiting to be solved inside the businesses I was already operating. I started implementing AI tools into my own day-to-day. Meeting notes, customer responses, reporting, the small stuff that compounds. The difference was immediate.

This practice started the way most good ones do: with someone saying "I'd pay you just to tell me where to use AI in my business." Same instinct, same need, across dozens of conversations. So I built a repeatable way to answer it, combining hands-on experience implementing these tools inside small businesses with the operator's view of what's genuinely worth fixing. No jargon, no transformation frameworks, no six-month engagements. Just a useful list, delivered in a week.

Michael Park LinkedIn
§ 06

Questions

Is this for my business?

If you're an owner-operator running a business between five and fifty people, probably yes. The assessment works best when you personally know where the friction is — which is almost always the case at that size. Under five and you may not have enough repeatable workflows to automate; over fifty and you probably need something more involved than a single assessment can offer.

Do I need to know anything about AI before the call?

No. The whole point is that you don't have to. Come to the call with a clear head about your business and where your time goes; leave the tool knowledge to me.

What sort of tools do you recommend?

Mostly well-known, off-the-shelf ones — meeting-note transcribers, marketing reporting dashboards, custom GPTs for repetitive customer questions, and automation platforms that connect tools you already use. I recommend what actually solves the problem in your business, not whatever's newest or loudest. Boring, working tools almost always win.

Will you try to upsell me on the review call?

No. The report names three heavier-lift opportunities that surfaced during the conversation, but the review call is about answering your questions and making sure the plan is clear. If, after reading the report, you want help with something bigger — automations, a custom GPT, a speed-to-lead system — we can scope that as a separate engagement. Plenty of clients stop at the assessment, and that's genuinely fine.

How is this different from hiring a proper AI consultancy?

It's cheaper, faster, and narrower. A proper consultancy will produce a strategy deck, a transformation framework, and an invoice with several commas in it. This produces a four-day plan you can run this week. Different products for different moments.

Do you work outside London?

The calls are on Zoom, so geography doesn't really matter. The business is run out of south London, and I have a slight preference for UK-based clients for timezone reasons, but happy to talk to anyone in Europe.

What if the report isn't useful?

In the unlikely event the assessment doesn't surface anything genuinely actionable for your business, I'll refund the fee in full. I've not had to do it yet, but the offer stands.

§ 07

Not ready to book? Take the primer.

A free, one-page PDF: the five places small businesses are getting AI to pay back this quarter, with the rough hours-per-week each one returns. No fluff, no transformation framework, no follow-up sales sequence.

One email with the PDF, then nothing unless you reply. We don't share your address. Privacy.

Stop reading about AI.
Start using it.

One call. One report. One plan that actually fits your week. Book a slot and we'll get you moving.

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