What I Automated for My Own Business (and What It Taught Me About AI Consulting)

Before MonPro-AI, I helped run Navelie, a sourcing operation between Delhi and Europe. My mother handles the supplier side in India. I handle everything that touches a screen.

For a long time, "everything that touches a screen" meant a mess of WhatsApp threads, Google Sheets, and screenshots forwarded between two countries and three time zones. Orders got lost. Status updates were verbal. I was the bottleneck.

So I built systems for it. Not because it was a portfolio piece. Because I was tired.

Order intake moved into a structured form that auto-creates a row in a sheet, tags the supplier, and pings my mother on WhatsApp. Status updates flow back the same way: she replies to a message, n8n parses it, the sheet updates, and the customer hears back. Inventory snapshots get pulled from supplier WhatsApp messages and dropped into a single dashboard I can check from anywhere.

It is not glamorous. It is not "AI-first." Most of it is glue code, a few LLM calls, and a lot of n8n.

But here is what it taught me, and why I am building MonPro-AI the way I am.

The wins did not come from clever AI. They came from removing handoffs. Every place a human had to copy something from one tool to another was a place orders died. AI helped at three specific points: parsing messy WhatsApp text, summarizing daily activity for me, and flagging anomalies. Maybe twenty percent of the system. The other eighty percent was workflow design.

Most "AI consultants" sell the twenty percent and ignore the eighty. They drop in a chatbot, call it transformation, and move on. The chatbot fails because the workflow underneath it was broken to begin with.

I would rather be the person who looks at the whole flow, finds the handoffs that are bleeding time and money, and then decides where AI actually earns its place.

That is what I am offering when I ask founders for twenty minutes. Not a pitch. A look at where the leaks are.

If you run a small business and you are the bottleneck, I have been there. I would like to hear about it.