John Greco: founder of Automation Labz
I built Automation Labz because the alternative for service business operators trying to figure out what to automate was paying a consultant thousands of dollars over 4-6 weeks or sitting through an agency funnel disguised as a free audit. Neither was honest. The 60-second audit is the response.
Why I built this
I started Automation Labz after spending months looking at what was available for small and mid-market service operators who wanted to figure out whether automation could actually move the needle in their shops. Every free audit I evaluated turned out to be the same thing — a Trojan horse for an agency build engagement. The audit existed to qualify the operator into the agency's funnel; the deliverable was calibrated to surface problems the agency wanted to solve; the brief disappeared into the agency's sales process the moment the audit ended. The operator never owned the analysis. The only honest alternative was paying a consultant thousands of dollars over 4-6 weeks of discovery calls, which most of the operators I knew could not justify on speculation. The gap was real, and the audit was the obvious response.
What I've built
I have built automations for countless service business operators — landscaping, roofing, HVAC, and the trades like them. Every engagement started with the same conversation: walking the operator through what was actually breaking in their shop, what to fix first, and what the realistic ROI looked like. The content library on this site is that conversation, written down, so any operator can have it without needing to hire me first.
The hundreds of pages on this site — the automation playbooks, the industry hubs, the tool comparisons, the calculators — are what I have been working on. The audit is the artifact that pulls all of it together into a single diagnostic an operator can run in 60 seconds. The content library is the operator-grade reference material that explains the audit's recommendations in operational detail. Together they are the product.
Why an audit, not consulting or courses
Every business operates different, but each industry has consistent pain points and procedures that can be easily automated. That should take 60 seconds to find, not 4-6 weeks and thousands of dollars. The pain points in an HVAC shop are not the pain points in a landscaping operation, but the pain points across all 200 HVAC shops in a metro are 80% the same — missed calls during peak season, dispatch chaos on Tuesday mornings, recurring maintenance plans that exist on paper but no one runs the renewal workflow. The pattern recognition is what makes the audit work. A diagnostic that asks 10-15 operator-grade questions about a specific shop can surface the same insights a 6-week consultant engagement would, because the underlying patterns are well understood. Consulting is the right answer when the operational pattern is genuinely novel; for the 90% of cases where the pattern matches what 200 other operators in the same trade are dealing with, the audit is the right answer and the consultant engagement is the wrong one. Courses are a separate product entirely — they teach the operator to do the work themselves, which is valuable in a different way but does not solve the operator who needs the diagnostic done now and would rather pay someone else to build the automations.
What you'll find on this site
Everything on Automation Labz is meant to be useful before you buy anything. Use the content to learn whether automation could help your shop; run the audit when you want a structured brief specific to your operation.
Industry playbooks — operator-grade guides across our industries. Each industry hub maps the highest-leverage automations for that trade with ROI math and the tool stack operators actually use.
Automation library — individual automation playbooks covering the cross-vertical workflows (AI voice agents, quote generation, recurring billing orchestration, review collection, field dispatch optimization) with implementation detail and tool comparisons.
Tool comparisons — head-to-head reviews of the platforms operators actually evaluate when buying. Workiz vs ServiceTitan, QuickBooks vs Xero, Make vs n8n, Twilio vs Bland, plus other comparisons across CRM, FSM, accounting, communications, and workflow automation categories.
Tool reviews — individual tool deep-dives covering pricing, real-operator pros and cons, integration depth, and the specific operational use cases each tool actually fits. The reference material that backs every recommendation in the comparison library.
Free calculators — profit margin, lifetime value, MRR, lead-cost-to-revenue, and other operator-grade tools you can use without an account or email submission.
Blog — ongoing operator-grade writing on automation strategy, tool decisions, and the operational patterns that show up across trades. Working through specific operator questions as they come up rather than chasing a publishing calendar.
Where else to find me
I am on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/john-j-greco. That is the only public channel I run actively right now — I would rather put the time into the editorial work on this site than spread thin across five platforms with nothing to say on four of them.
Run your own audit
If reading this page made you wonder what an audit would tell you about your own business, the easiest way to find out is to run one. Free, takes 60 seconds, gives you a concrete plan in 24 hours.
No credit card. No follow-up call unless you ask.