Playbook: a real-world service business

Not every business lives online — this playbook uses the yacht-services pattern to staff a company that meets people in the physical world.

What you’ll do

• Set up a services Company with a front desk and a back office.
• Put a kiosk receptionist in front of visitors.
• Keep enquiries and bookings flowing to the right worker.

1. Start from the yacht-services pack

Open Settings → Demos and install the yacht-services pack for a ready-made services company, then rewrite its workers to match your trade — charters, repairs, a marina, a clinic, a studio. Load your real service catalog, pricing, and policies into the Library and mark the non-negotiables as an SOP.

2. Put a receptionist out front

A service business has walk-ins, so give it a front desk. Set up a Kiosk (Settings → 🖥️ Kiosk): mount a tablet in the lobby and pick a warm, concise worker to greet visitors. It’s multilingual — perfect for an international marina or clinic — and can answer questions, give directions, take messages, and help with bookings or check-in. Add live voice if you want hands-free conversation.

3. Route enquiries to the back office

Messages, bookings, and check-ins the receptionist captures land in that worker’s Inbox (and show under Reports → Receptionists & Kiosks). From there, route the real work — a quote, a schedule, a follow-up — to the right back-office worker, with Theodor coordinating.

Lock the front desk

For a public lobby, set a PIN to exit kiosk mode and an idle timer to reset the screen between visitors, so the tablet stays a kiosk until you unlock it.

Follow-ups still need approval

A captured booking or enquiry becomes a draft reply for a human to approve before it’s sent — even a front-desk message never auto-replies on its own.

What this looks like for a trade or a clinic

If your work happens with your hands or in a room with someone, the admin is the part that eats your evenings. Three places this helps:

The quote you write at 9pm. You had the site visit, you know the price, and the writing-up is what keeps slipping. Dictate or type the rough facts — measurements, materials, what you agreed — and let a worker produce the formal quote in your template, with your terms attached. You check the numbers and send. The job that used to cost an evening costs a review.

The follow-up that wins the work. Quotes go quiet, and chasing feels awkward, so most people don’t. A worker drafts the polite check-in for anything unanswered after five days, referencing what you actually discussed. It waits in your approvals queue — you decide which ones go.

The questions that interrupt your day. Opening hours, what to bring, how long it takes, where to park, do you cover this postcode. A kiosk out front handles them in the waiting room; a draft-only inbox connection handles them by email. Both answer from your material, in your words.

Realistic about what it won’t do

It won’t manage your diary for you, quote a job it hasn’t been given the numbers for, or replace the judgement that comes from having seen the site. What it removes is the writing-up, the chasing and the repetition — which for most service businesses is where the unpaid hours actually go.

Recap

A real-world service business gets a kiosk receptionist out front and a grounded back office behind it, with every outbound follow-up human-approved. Last, the dogfood case study — the content studio that produced this very Academy.

📖 Reference in the docs: Kiosk · Channels

➡️ Next: Playbook: the content studio