Plain English. Workflow first. Technology second. No AI hype.

Your time is worth more than manual and repetitive work.

Thirty years in operations. I find the tasks that are eating your week and build the fix. We start with a 20-minute call so we can both decide whether it's worth going further.

We start by finding one workflow worth improving.

From there, the work might be automation, hands-on AI training with your team, or a practical review of where AI tools could save time in the day-to-day work.

  • One workflow or recurring task that looks worth improving
  • Whether it needs automation, AI support, training, or a simpler process change
  • Where tools like Claude or OpenAI might help in the day-to-day work
  • Security, access, and data boundaries - who can see what, what should stay inside the business, and where the real risks are
  • Who on your team should be involved if we go further
  • Whether the next step is a build, an on-site review, or practical training

There's no shortage of people telling you AI will change everything.

I've spent 30 years inside real operations — factories, warehouses, cellar doors, retail, and supply chains.

  • Reporting Manual reports stitched together from three systems every week.
  • Re-keying Orders entered twice because the systems still do not talk to each other.
  • Approvals Jobs stalled in someone’s inbox for four days while the rest of the workflow waits.
  • Spreadsheet Lore One critical spreadsheet only Janine understands, and Janine is on leave.
  • Automation Risk No clear line between what is safe to automate, what needs oversight, and what should stay manual.

What is manual repetitive work actually costing you?

Most operators I meet have never put a number on this. It's always more than they think.

Hours per week spent on this task One specific job that keeps coming back
Hourly cost of the person doing it Salary, super, and overhead — not just the wage
Weeks per year this happens 48 for most year-round operations
Annual cost of this one task AUD 6,480
Over three years AUD 19,440
Hours returned to the team per year 144 hours

But the direct cost is only part of the story. Those 144 hours do not just disappear from a spreadsheet. They belong to a person who could be doing something else. Something that moves revenue, tightens margins, or closes a problem that has been sitting on the shelf for months because there was never enough time to get to it. The real question is not just what the task costs; it is what is not getting done because of it.

Most people I see find three to five tasks like this during our first call. That's the point of the call: to see if there's enough in the pipe to make working together worth it.

The process

How it works

A practical, low-risk process from first conversation to running automation. No big commitments upfront.

01
30–60 minutes
Discovery
One conversation to find out if there's something worth fixing.
We start with a conversation. You walk us through the workflow causing the most friction — the one that eats hours, creates double-handling, or keeps breaking down at the handoff. We ask questions and listen.

This conversation costs you nothing. But it's not a soft intro. We'll talk through what's actually possible, what a fix would involve, and what it would realistically cost. You leave with clarity, not a sales pitch.
You get
A clear picture of whether there's an opportunity worth pursuing — and enough information to decide with confidence.
No obligation / On us
02
3–5 days
Workflow Audit
Map how the work actually moves, not how it's supposed to.
We trace the workflow from start to finish: which systems are involved, where information gets re-entered, where it stalls, and where the manual steps are hiding. This might mean walking through your Outlook setup, your Xero process, your field reporting routine, or your weekly reporting run. We document what we find in plain language.

This step is also at firerain's cost. No invoice, no obligation. At the end, you'll have a real map of how your workflow actually runs, a ranked list of where time is being lost, and a clear sense of what it would cost to fix. After this step, the decision is yours.
You get
A current-state workflow map with bottlenecks and gaps identified, ranked by impact, with cost context attached.
No obligation / On us
03
3–5 days
Prioritisation and Roadmap
Pick the one workflow worth fixing first, and plan from there.
Not everything gets fixed at once. We review the audit findings and identify the opportunities with the clearest business value and the lowest delivery risk. The output is a practical plan — usually one clear first step, with a logical sequence behind it if more work follows.
You get
A priority shortlist, quick wins identified, and a phased roadmap with a defined starting point.
04
2–4 weeks
Pilot Automation
Build one focused solution, prove the value, then decide what's next.
The first project is deliberately scoped tight. It might be pulling invoice data from email attachments into Xero, automating a field report template, or connecting a form submission to a SharePoint list. We build and test it, you see it working, and we refine before anything larger gets committed.
You get
A working automation for one workflow, tested and handed over, with a clear before-and-after result.
05
2–6 weeks per expansion
Integration and Expansion
Connect the systems, scale the gains, keep it practical.
Once the pilot proves itself, we extend the approach into adjacent workflows and integrations. That might mean connecting Outlook to Xero, feeding Power BI from four existing data sources, or routing field inputs into SharePoint automatically. Each step is deliberate — no runaway scope, no solutions bigger than the problem.
You get
A growing network of connected, automated workflows — each one building on the last.

Every engagement starts with the discovery conversation. No invoice, no obligation to go further.

Thirty years of operations. That's why this works.

Reinier van Vuure

I've spent my career running operations — international FMCG, retail distribution, manufacturing, logistics. I've managed operations, finance, supply chains on four continents and built reporting systems for businesses that had nothing but spreadsheets and a whiteboard.

A 25-year-old automation developer can build the same technical solution I can. What they can't do is walk into your business and tell you which spreadsheet is load-bearing and which one is make-work. That triage is the hard part. Being tool-agnostic and independent is the rest of it — and nobody else in this market is offering both.

I started Firerain because I kept meeting people who knew AI could help but couldn't find someone who understood their operation well enough to actually deliver it.

A few things I'm sure of.

Most AI consulting is slide decks and strategy. I build things that run on Monday morning and are still running in six months.

The people who sell automation don't understand operations. The people who understand operations don't build automation. I do both, and that's the whole job.

Your team's time is the point. Everything else — the AI, the dashboards, the integrations — is just a way of getting it back.

— Reinier, Barossa Valley

Let's look at one workflow that's costing you time every week.

Tell me a bit about what's on your mind. I'll come back within a day.

Sent directly to our team Australia