Just Released: The Journey, September 2026

Every business owner has a workaround.

The spreadsheet nobody else understands. The email you copy, paste, and then edit three fields in. The checklist that only lives in your head, which is fine right up until the week it isn’t.

Those workarounds got you here. They also cost you something every time you use one, and the cost is easy to miss because it’s small and constant rather than large and obvious.

The September issue of The Journey is about eleven people who got rid of theirs. None of them set out to automate their business. Each hit a specific irritation and decided to solve it permanently, usually in an afternoon.

Read the full September 2026 issue →

Where to start, if you’re starting

Start where you’re repeating yourself. If you’ve retyped the same information into a second place, rewritten the same email, or answered the same question for the tenth client this year, that’s your candidate. Not the flashiest process. The most repeated one.

Every owner in this issue landed there independently, which is probably the most useful thing about reading them together.

What they built

Donna Lyttle has used 17hats since 2020 as a Virtual Assistant, and her argument is worth sitting with: automation is great, but visibility into that automation is better. If a workflow fires and you can’t see that it fired, you’re still carrying the process in your head. Her five-step check turns Pipelines from a pretty board into the actual source of truth. “I don’t have to rely on memory or constantly ask, ‘What’s happening with this client?'” she writes. “I can look.”

Danielle Uhl solves the problem that appears the moment you work with anyone else. Your contractors need project details but don’t need access to your account. Her fix uses Custom Project Fields, answer mapping and a Contract template to produce a print-ready brief that fills itself in from information the client already gave you. Her team walks in prepared instead of texting her questions all day.

Nicole Larson makes a point balloon and event decor businesses feel in their bones. So much of the work is tied to events that repeat: annual galas, company picnics, seasonal displays, birthdays. A booking you already earned once is almost always the easiest to earn again, and losing it usually has nothing to do with unhappiness. The client simply forgot who did the balloons last year. Her rebooking system logs the likely repeat the moment you spot it and lets a workflow send the warm “it’s almost that time again” email at whatever lead time suits the event.

Will Wohler takes on mini sessions, the quick bookings that sound easy and then quietly consume a weekend. Write everything down in the order you actually do it, he says, then turn that document into emails, questionnaires and scheduling rules. His most transferable tip: break one big process into several small workflows, so that when something breaks it breaks in one stage rather than all of them.

Christine Lopez, a student loan consultant, asked a question that reframes the whole exercise. If I have to solve the same administrative problem repeatedly, can I build a system that solves it once? Her answer was a naming convention. She calls her scheduling service “2026 Student Loan Services” rather than naming it after the appointment, so every booking creates a correctly named, correctly tagged project on its own. One update each January replaces a year of renaming things by hand.

Evan Schmidt lost a booking to his own inbox. A referral emailed him directly, he meant to log it that night, and three weeks later she followed up and he had no record of her at all. Lead capture forms only catch people who use your website. His fix routes emailed leads through a dedicated inbox and an automation that pulls out the details and creates the contact record. He still has to notice the email. He no longer has to retype it.

Nicole Larson’s second piece is the one most likely to change how you read your own business. Most pipelines answer “where is this job right now?”, which works fine if you sell one thing. So she built a second pipeline where the phases are her services rather than her steps. At a glance: 19 active clients in Systems Support, zero in Custom Quote, zero in Workshop Bookings. In a per-job view she’d never have caught that imbalance.

Deb Mitzel writes for wedding vendors, though the mechanism travels. You already collect the getting-ready time, the ceremony start, the venue address. Then the wedding gets closer, something shifts, and you find out by text. Her confirmation checkpoint sends a short questionnaire around 30 days out that shows clients what you already have on file, ending with the question that does all the work: do we need to chat?

Sara Alepin argues that collaboration is a growth strategy rather than a favor, and that managing partners deserves the same infrastructure you give clients. Templates for pitching, contracts that set scope, workflows for promo reminders, a pipeline that carries partners from first pitch to final thank you.

Liz August has watched discovery calls stretch into free consulting for years. Her system replaces willpower with structure: a qualifying question that names the price of paid work before anyone can book, a fixed 15-minute call with boundary-setting language on the booking page, and automated follow-up that moves people to paid work without anyone having to push. She reports close to 50% conversion from free calls to paid Strategy Sessions.

Jaimie Dee names something every service provider will recognize. A wedding date feels real. A client meeting with a calendar invite feels real. Editing the gallery does not, so it slides while the client waits and wonders. Her studio schedules the image reveal meeting before the images are finished, which gives delivery a date, a person and a reason to be done.

Do you need to be technical?

No. Nine of the eleven systems are built entirely from features already in a 17hats account: Custom Fields, Tags, Workflows, Pipelines, Online Scheduling, Questionnaires. Only Evan’s email lead capture reaches for an outside tool, and the free plan covers most small business use.

The hard part isn’t technical. It’s sitting down long enough to write out what you currently do by hand, which is boring and takes about an hour and is the reason most people never get to the building part.

Read the ones that aren’t your industry

Amanda Rae’s advice in this issue is the right way to use it. Read the articles outside your profession, because the process usually transfers even when the example doesn’t.

A wedding vendor’s confirmation questionnaire is a client check-in. A balloon artist’s rebooking sequence is an annual renewal system. A photographer’s Premiere Night is any internal task that needs an external deadline.

Her challenge for the autumn is a good one: find a process you’re still doing by hand and automate, organize or streamline it. One afternoon now, against all the afternoons you get back later.

Read the September 2026 issue →

New to 17hats? Contracts, invoicing, scheduling, questionnaires and workflows live in one place, which is what makes these systems buildable rather than theoretical. Start a free 7-day trial.

The voices behind this issue

• Donna Lyttle — How Virtual Assistants Use 17hats for Visibility Into Automated Processes
• Danielle Uhl — How Teams Create a Print-Ready Project Brief with 17hats Contracts
• Nicole Larson — How Balloon & Event Decor Businesses Rebook Annual Clients with 17hats
• Will Wohler — How to Automate Headshot Sessions for Photographers
• Christine Lopez — Build It Once. Use It All Year.
• Evan Schmidt — How Photographers Automatically Capture Every Email Lead
• Nicole Larson — How a Systems Consultant Tracks Every Offer Through 17hats Pipelines
• Deb Mitzel — How Wedding Vendors Effectively Confirm Wedding Day Details with 17hats
• Sara Alepin — How Online Service Providers Use 17hats to Manage Collaborations
• Liz August — How a Business Consultant Protects Paid Expertise with 17hats
• Jaimie Dee — How Our Photography Studio Uses 17hats Scheduling to Turn Image Delivery Into a Deadline