EP34: Missed Calls to Booked Revenue: An SME’s AI Playbook with The AI Pros
From Multi-Million Pound Bank Transformations to Small Business AI
With 42 years of experience, including running technology implementations for banks with budgets of £78-80 million and teams of over a thousand people, Mark brings a rare depth of large-enterprise project delivery experience to small business AI adoption. After founding project management consultancy Project Partners, he and his team began implementing AI in their own operations — and found their genuine passion lay in helping smaller businesses gain what he calls an "unfair advantage" through the same technology, leading to the creation of The AI Pros as a dedicated venture.
Why 70% of Projects Fail — and What That Teaches Us About AI
Mark opens with a striking statistic from his enterprise background: roughly 70% of major projects fail to hit their intended time, cost, or quality targets. His diagnosis, drawing on Simon Sinek's "Start With Why," is that most organisations begin with a proposed solution rather than a clearly defined problem — and that failure, even when it doesn't show up until later in a project, is often baked in from the very first hurdle. This principle now underpins The AI Pros' entire approach: understanding a business's actual problem, in detail, before any technology conversation begins.
The Mindset Gap Between Big Business and Small Business
Reflecting on his transition from enterprise consulting to working with small businesses through the Entrepreneur Circle, Mark highlights a key cultural difference: smaller businesses, with comparatively little to lose, are often far more willing to take calculated risks and iterate quickly — a test-and-learn mindset that larger, more risk-averse corporations frequently govern to death. He connects this directly to broader AI adoption trends, noting that businesses which already went through an agile mindset shift during the digital transformation era tend to adapt to AI far more readily than those still catching up.
Case Study: Reducing 1,800 Missed Calls a Month at a Midlands Estate Agency
Mark shares a detailed, phased case study involving a five-branch estate agency missing roughly 1,800 calls per month across its branches, despite extended opening hours. Rather than jumping straight to a generic AI solution, The AI Pros began by deeply understanding the business process — and deployed an AI voice agent, cloned from a branch manager's own voice for a warm, local, low-latency customer experience, to handle overflow and out-of-hours calls.
The rollout followed a clear phased approach:
- Phase one — the AI agent answers calls, provides accurate information (opening hours, locations), and logs enquiries directly into the estate agency's CRM, replacing a poorly integrated human call-handling service that previously only emailed missed-call details.
- Phase two — the agent gains access to the CRM and vendor calendars, allowing it to actually book property viewings directly during the call, confirmed via automated text message.
- Planned future phases — expanding the AI agent to become the business's first point of contact, rather than a fallback, once performance is proven across the vast majority of use cases.
Turning Missed Calls Into Measurable ROI
A key strength of Mark's approach is translating raw operational metrics into clear financial terms business leaders immediately understand. By analysing call types, the team quantified that a significant share of missed calls were viewing requests, and — factoring in the average number of viewings required to secure a property sale — calculated a substantial opportunity cost per missed call. Tracking baseline metrics weekly allowed the team to demonstrate a clear reduction in time-to-viewing, alongside a call-handling cost roughly a third of the previous outsourced human service — providing fast, tangible proof of ROI to unlock further project phases.
A More Experimental Frontier: AI-Narrated Property Walkthroughs
Mark also describes a more experimental initiative with the same client: using indoor drone technology, combined with AI video editing to remove the accompanying agent from shot, and AI voiceover narration, to deliver fully automated video walkthroughs for every property listing — a capability the agency wants in order to maintain its position as the leading agent in its area, but which wouldn't be financially viable using traditional videography.
A Structured Discovery Process, Not a Rush to Technology
When engaging new clients, Mark deliberately avoids leading with technology or AI terminology. Instead, discovery conversations map a business across its core functional areas — sales, marketing, operations, finance, HR, fulfilment, customer service — identifying where genuine constraints or bottlenecks exist. A favourite diagnostic question: if you had 100 hours to focus purely on winning one new client, could you do it? The goal, from there, is identifying which parts of that process can be automated or AI-assisted, ultimately compressing that 100-hour effort down to the small fraction that genuinely requires human judgement.
Clients typically receive a prioritised roadmap, mapped against potential ROI and required investment, allowing them to start with the single highest-impact use case — often targeting a return within 30 days.
Orchestration Over Custom Build
Rather than building proprietary AI models, Mark is clear that The AI Pros' value lies in orchestrating and gluing together existing tools — platforms like n8n, Make.com, Replit, Lovable, open-source libraries, and APIs such as OpenAI's — into carefully engineered, reliable solutions. He frames the real barrier for most small businesses not as a lack of available technology, but a combined gap in knowledge and capacity: even business owners aware of what's possible rarely have the time to implement it themselves.
Staying Current in a Fast-Moving Landscape
Asked how he keeps pace with an AI ecosystem evolving at exponential speed, Mark offers a grounding piece of advice: AI is as unfinished as it will ever be, and chasing every new tool is a losing game. Instead, his team maintains broad awareness through curated research feeds and professional networks, then conducts focused, use-case-specific research once a client's actual problem is properly understood — treating implementations as living solutions requiring ongoing support and updates, rather than one-off deliveries.
Democratising Enterprise-Grade Capability for Small Business
Mark closes with a broader reflection on his motivation: small and medium businesses, often described as the backbone of the UK economy, have historically lacked access to the kind of structured, high-calibre implementation capability larger enterprises take for granted. He suggests the UK's real constraint isn't a shortage of ideas or innovation, but a shortage of implementation capability — and finds particular motivation in helping business owners directly, rather than working within larger, more impersonal corporate structures.