What we publish
Workbench Press publishes practical manuals for owners of small businesses — trades, professional practices, and service firms — who want to build useful, controlled workflows rather than read about what AI might one day do.
Our books share a standard. They tell you where a formula is more reliable than a model, and where a person is more reliable than either. They show failures as well as successes. They state plainly what has been measured and what has only been reasoned. And they never promise an income, a result, or a saving they cannot show you the arithmetic for.
Where a book gives a figure, the figure has been checked. Where it cannot verify something, it says so.
AI Automation for Small Business
Book One
The Owner Bottleneck
Finding the hours your business eats, and automating the first one.
Book Two
The Gap Between Hello and Yes
Turning inquiries into proposals without dropping one.
Book Three
Escape Velocity
Customer service that answers itself — and knows when to stop.
Book Four
The Business That Remembers
Making what happened into what's written down.
Book Five
The Machine Room
Wiring sales, delivery and service into one system you can maintain.
Build Notes
The books design workflows; they deliberately do not tell you which button to press in which piece of software. Interfaces change every few months and a book does not.
Platform-specific wiring lives here instead, in a supplement with its own edition number, so the perishable part can be reissued without reprinting a book. If your copy is more than a year old, check this page for a newer one.
Build Notes — Edition 1.0
30 pages. Included at no cost with the bundle. It builds every workflow in the five books on tools that are free with an ordinary personal account, then specifies what changes when you connect them. Every external claim carries its source and the year it was read.
Contact
Questions about a book, a correction, or a file that didn't arrive:
Corrections are welcome and are published with the next edition of the affected book.