AI WIN #9: TINTS AND TONES · AI for Contractors

AI WIN #9: TINTS AND TONES

Meet Jesse.

He owns Tints & Tones, a commercial and residential painting company serving Windsor-Essex and Chatham-Kent. Before AI, he was spending an hour and a half on-site after every walkthrough — measuring, calculating, writing it all up in the truck, then presenting the proposal to the client.

He wanted to get that down to 30 minutes. He's already there.

Jesse built out an estimating workflow using Claude Cowork, Granola, and NotebookLM that takes everything captured during the site visit and turns it into a polished, client-ready proposal. Faster than his competitors can finish their measurements. Clients regularly can't believe it. "You're telling me you typed all this out in 30 minutes?" That disbelief is a competitive advantage.

But the bigger shift isn't just speed. It's capacity. Jesse started by asking one question: what 20-minute tasks can we automate? Do that across an entire business, and suddenly you have 20 extra hours a week that used to disappear into the necessary-but-not-valuable work every owner gets buried in.

He describes his business before: daunting. Now? Systematic.

"I don't even feel like we're the same company in such a short period of time."

Tools:

Claude Cowork

https://claude.ai/

Granola

https://www.granola.ai/

NotebookLM

https://www.notebooklm.google/

Try this:

Write down every task in your week that takes 15-30 minutes and feels repetitive
Pick one and ask Claude: "How could I automate or speed up this process?"
Record your next client walkthrough with Granola and feed the transcript into Claude to draft your proposal
Measure the time difference — then find the next task to eliminate

What's the most daunting task in your week right now? Drop it in the comments — someone in this community has probably already figured out how to automate it.

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