The operational engine
that works at 2 AM.
A holiday-let service that scales to hundreds of owners can't run on heroics. Every issue — noise at midnight, no heat on a Sunday, a guest locked out at 2 AM — needs a system that already knows the category, the severity, the SLA, the responsible trade, and the owner-comms cadence before a human looks at it. This proposal designs that system, layer by layer, and hands your developer the exact spec to build from.
From chaos to a system that thinks before you do.
Holiday-let operations fail at the seams — the gap between intake and triage, between triage and dispatch, between dispatch and owner comms. Each gap is where the ball gets dropped. The architecture below removes the seams: every node solves a specific failure mode you live with today. Hover any node to see what it solves and how it fits the engine.
What you get. Phase by phase.
This is a design and architecture engagement — the output is a system spec your developer can build from, not the build itself. Every phase ships a concrete document or schema you sign off on before the next phase begins.
- Founder interview + automation dev sync — current state, constraints, and the standard you want to define
- Catalog the top 30 real-world incidents: noise, heating, access, damage, lockout, no-show, billing disputes
- Map current escalation paths — formal and informal — and pinpoint where the ball gets dropped today
- Document the "GuestShield standard" as it exists today vs the standard the architecture will hold the team to
- Issue taxonomy — 6 categories × 5 severity tiers with explicit examples per cell
- SLA matrix — response time, resolution time, and escalation trigger per tier
- Claude triage prompt + classification logic spec — handed to your developer for n8n implementation
- Edge-case decision trees: 2 AM, weekends, repeat issues, multi-unit, sentiment escalation
- Trade dispatch workflow — roster schema, availability windows, dispatch logic, fallback rules
- Owner communication cadence — per-tier messaging rules, channel selection, escalation triggers
- Internal dashboard spec — what ops sees, what the owner sees, what the founder sees
- Cross-workflow handoffs — triage → dispatch → comms → resolution → audit, with explicit state transitions
- Written SOPs for the top 20 scenarios — decision trees ops can follow without thinking at 2 AM
- Quality control loop spec — post-resolution audit questions, weekly review cadence, playbook update process
- "GuestShield Standard" definition — measurable service-excellence KPIs with target thresholds
- Failure-mode runbook — what to do when each system layer breaks (the system that handles its own outages)
- Complete visual system diagram showing every layer + data flow — your developer builds straight from it
- Airtable base schema spec — tables, fields, relationships, automations, validation rules
- n8n workflow logic outlines — node-by-node decision logic in plain English, ready to wire
- Quarterly architecture review framework — how the system stays current as GuestShield scales past the first hundred owners
Four weeks. Mapping to handoff.
Each week ships a signed-off document the developer can build against. No drifting scope, no "we'll figure it out as we go."
Audit + Mapping
Top-30 incident catalog, current-state escalation map, "GuestShield standard" definition. The foundation everything else is anchored to.
Foundation
Triage + Severity
Issue taxonomy, 5-tier SLA matrix, Claude triage spec, edge-case decision trees. The brain of the engine is on paper.
Triage Spec
Workflows Designed
Trade dispatch, owner comms cadence, dashboard specs, cross-workflow handoffs. Every layer below triage is fully specified.
Workflows
SOPs + Handoff
Top-20 SOPs, QC loop spec, Airtable schema, n8n logic outlines, system diagram. Your developer has everything needed to start building.
Handoff
GuestShield team — let's walk this together.
A 30-minute call where I share my screen, walk through the architecture, pressure-test it against three real incidents from the last 30 days, and confirm scope against your top operational priorities. Happy to walk through commercials on the call.