Rebuilding our business operating system around agents
Published November 11, 2026 by Joe Fiorello
I run a small software company, and our customers aren't one kind of business. We build for sports facilities, youth and adult baseball leagues, travel and club teams, and education programs. We also run platforms for a consulting practice and an online apparel store. Each of those businesses has its own rhythm, its own vocabulary and its own list of things that break on a Saturday morning. On top of that, I'm running my own business: selling, proposing, invoicing, posting, and keeping two dozen client sites healthy.
For a long time the tool I used to run all of that was the same kind of tool everybody uses. A dashboard with a row of tabs down the side. Clients, Billing, Leads, Projects, Tickets, Calendar, and about twenty more. It worked. It was also slowly eating my day.
This post is about how we rebuilt our own Business Operating System, ProSlot BOS, the same one we build our clients' platforms on, around agents instead of tabs, and how a feeling that it had gotten "too clicky" ended up changing how the whole thing is put together.
What there actually is to manage
It helps to see the whole surface first, because the surface is the problem.
Facilities have lesson and cage bookings, classes and camps, memberships and installments, waivers, staff schedules, parent accounts, payments on each facility's own Stripe account, and a steady stream of "can you add this to the site" requests. When a booking page goes down or a payment fails, somebody's Saturday is ruined.
Leagues have registration and deposits per event, team rosters, schedules with hundreds of games, scores that coaches forget to enter, standings, playoff brackets, weather on game day, and coaches who want one small change to the schedule view before next season. Youth leagues and adult leagues work differently, and both have to work right.
Education programs have enrollment from inquiry to deposit, family accounts, program calendars, digitized curriculum libraries, and student records that are covered by privacy law. The bar for who can see what is high, and it should be.
Teams have rosters, player registrations, uniforms, dues and invoices, tryouts, and a coach who wants to know who paid. The consulting practice has client engagements, scheduling and its own billing. The online store has products, inventory, orders and shipping. Different words, same problem: a small business owner who needs to know what's late, what's owed and what needs an answer.
And then there's ProSlot itself: leads and proposals, contracts and renewals, invoices and collections, monthly revenue, expenses and platform costs, social posts, search, client asks that turn into tickets, delivery dates I've promised, and the errors that come in from every site we run.
Every one of those things had a tab. Some had three. And the honest truth is that most days, I didn't need to see any of them. I needed to know which five things needed me.
"It feels clunky"
The redesign started with me looking at our own admin and saying it felt clunky and hard to navigate. It still felt like an old school dashboard. I wanted it to be more interactive and less clicky.
That's a vague feeling, so we made it specific. We counted the clicks for the things I do every day. Approving something an agent drafted meant finding the right tab, opening the record, reading it, clicking approve, then confirming in a pop up. Working through ten of those was twenty clicks across several screens. Seeing what one area of the business did today meant visiting that area's page and reading tables I'd already read yesterday.
Then we looked at how the better tools handle this. The pattern that kept showing up was a screen organized around the work that needs you, instead of around where the data happens to live.
Every tab still exists. It just lives inside the agent that owns it, and what needs me comes to one place.
Agents own areas. I own decisions.
The core idea is simple. Every area of the business has an agent that owns it, and every page that used to be a tab now lives inside the agent responsible for it.
There's a CFO agent that watches revenue, receivables, expenses and what the platform costs us to run. A Collections agent that keeps an eye on what's owed. A Pipeline agent for leads, proposals and renewals. A Client Success agent for asks and quiet accounts. Social and SEO agents for marketing. A Reliability agent and a triage agent for errors on any of our sites. And a CEO agent that reviews the others every week, adjusts their budgets and tells them what I keep approving and what I keep rejecting.
Reliability and triage keep the sites running day to day. Next to them there's now a CTO, which looks after what the platform itself is built on. It replaced a check I used to run every Monday, and it covers far more than that check did. It watches our main system, the services behind it and every client site. It looks for risky or malicious outside software we depend on, gaps in how updates get shipped, and software getting close to the end of its support, and it notices when a client's site has fallen behind on the common foundation we build every site on. Big upgrades go on its release calendar and get planned like any other piece of work.
A small, safe fix can go out on its own once every test passes. Anything bigger comes to my inbox first, and so does anything that touches payments or the systems every client shares.
The newest layer is directors, one per vertical. Today there's a Director of Facilities, a Director of Leagues and a Director of Education. Each one has a roster of clients, and each morning it looks across site health, billing, delivery dates and client requests for its roster and tells me what's late, what's due, what's coming up, and what needs me. A league with games past their date and no scores. A deliverable that slipped. A renewal ninety days out with no decision on it.
A Director of Teams is next. Consulting and e-commerce will get directors too, once each of those verticals has more than one client and the work calls for it. Until then, our Client Success agent watches those clients, so nothing late slips through just because its director doesn't exist yet. Adding a director is mostly a setup step now. They're all built the same way, so each new one starts with everything the others already learned.
The part that makes this work for a small business is the rule underneath all of it. Agents draft, propose and flag. They don't act on anything that reaches a person or moves money. That goes to me.
One inbox, decided from the keyboard
So the home screen is an inbox. Every pending decision from every agent lands in one list, with the full draft on the right. Not a summary with a link. The actual email, the actual dates, the reason the agent filed it and what will happen if I say yes.
I move with J and K, approve with A, reject with R and a reason if I want to give one. There are no confirm pop ups. When I approve, I get a few seconds of undo instead, and nothing is sent until that window closes. Anything that moves money or goes out to a client takes a second press, right where I am. Working through ten items went from twenty clicks on several screens to about ten keystrokes on one.
Move, decide, keep going. Money and anything sent to a client asks for a second press.
The information comes to you
The second shift was flipping who does the looking. Instead of me visiting each area to find out what changed, each agent tells me. The morning briefing is a short page with what needs me and the numbers I actually check. Each agent has its own dashboard built around its job. The CFO's shows money. The directors show their roster, what's late and what's planned. The CEO's shows every agent, what it spent and what it filed.
Some of the work I care about isn't urgent at all. A league asked for a handful of features I plan to build over the winter. Those used to sit in my tickets looking old and ignored. Now I can defer them to a quarter, tell the Director of Leagues they're part of the winter plan, and they show up on the delivery calendar as planned work instead of aging in a queue. When the quarter gets close and they're still open, the director brings it back to me once.
Everything is still there
I was clear about one thing from the start. Nothing gets lost. Every page that used to be a tab still exists, in the workspace of the agent that owns it. Every old link, including the ones in emails, still lands in the right place. And a command bar reaches any client, any page, any agent and a growing list of actions without leaving the keyboard. The agents are the front door.
How we keep it honest
The obvious worry with putting AI in front of your business is that it says something confidently wrong. We designed around that from day one, and I'll describe the principles without getting into the recipe.
The software does the math. The AI writes the sentence. Every figure an agent states, every date and every dollar amount, is checked against the actual data before it reaches me, and if it doesn't match, it doesn't go out. An agent writing about one client can't mention another client. Children's information is never sent to the AI, which matters when most of your customers are youth sports and education programs. And every agent runs inside a monthly budget I set, so cost is a decision, not a surprise.
None of that is glamorous. It's the reason I can let these agents work while I sleep.
Why this matters for a small business
We're a small team serving six verticals. We don't have a department for each one, and we're not going to. What we have now is an agent for each area, a director for each vertical that needs one, and one place where the decisions land. I spend my time deciding instead of digging.
That's also the point for our clients. The facilities, leagues, teams, programs and stores we build for are small businesses too, usually run by someone who'd rather be on the field, in the classroom or at the counter than in a dashboard. Everything we're learning running our own business this way is going into the platforms we build for them.
If you run a small business like any of these and you're drowning in tabs, I'd like to hear about it.
Joe