The Work Only Laurence Could Do
“Automate me out of everything except being on camera, but still let me feel in control of quality and customer experience.”
That was Laurence Edwards’ brief for Black Mountain Honey’s eight-week transformation.
Not “help us publish more.” Not “add AI to the business.” Not even “build us a better Notion workspace.”
Laurence wanted to step out of the middle of the company without stepping away from the parts that made it special.
That distinction mattered. Laurence is the founder, the beekeeper and the public face of Black Mountain Honey. Their expertise shapes the advice customers trust. Their personality drives the videos, courses and community. Their standards define the “over-the-top customer service” the company prides itself on.
But those high-value contributions sat beside dozens of lower-value demands on the same attention: finding files, moving thumbnails, checking transcripts, answering familiar questions, approving content and carrying messages between people.
Laurence was not just leading the business. Laurence had become part of its infrastructure.
Over eight weeks, we worked with Black Mountain Honey to start changing that. The result was not a finished autonomous company. It was the first meaningful operational layer beneath the founder: a shared way for knowledge, work and responsibility to move without every connection passing through Laurence’s head.
Meet Black Mountain Honey
Black Mountain Honey is a family-run beekeeping business based near Mold in North Wales. What began with a swarm landing in Laurence’s garden in 2015 grew into a business spanning queen bees, nucleus colonies, award-winning Welsh honey and practical beekeeping education.
Through thousands of YouTube videos, livestreams, courses and the Hive Q community, Black Mountain Honey helps people become more confident beekeepers. It is a modern rural business with several identities at once: agricultural operation, ecommerce company, media brand, education platform and customer-support organisation.
The thread connecting all of them is knowledge.
What should a beekeeper do this week? Which advice applies at this point in the season? Which product will help? What did Laurence explain in a video three years ago? How should Chrissy answer a technical customer question without giving the wrong information?
As the business developed, more of that knowledge accumulated across videos, messages, files and tools. But much of the context connecting it still lived with Laurence.
When The Founder Becomes The Operating System
Black Mountain Honey had already started building in Notion. The direction was right: useful databases existed, the team was producing content through the workspace and some early AI instructions and skills were in place.
The promise was visible. The operating backbone was not there yet.
Different people could complete their own part of a process, but the team still relied on Laurence to explain how those parts connected. Documentation sat across several containers. Content moved between YouTube, Google Drive and Notion. Customer questions often returned to Laurence for technical validation. Seasonal knowledge existed, but it did not reliably resurface when the business needed it again.
Jill described Laurence during the blueprint presentation as the company’s “human middleware”: the person translating between systems, people and workflows.
Laurence agreed.
“I’m the bit in the middle all the time. A lot of that could be automated.”
This is a version of what we call the Human Context Window: the finite number of threads, decisions and relationships one person can actively hold and act on at once.
Founders hit this ceiling constantly. They know why a customer matters, where a file lives, what the team agreed last week, which exception applies and how today’s decision affects next month. The business works because they keep all of those relationships alive.
Making the founder faster does not solve that problem. It can even make it worse. More work moves through the same limited attention.
The real leverage comes when the organisation can carry more of the context itself—so the founder contributes judgment, expertise and creative direction rather than remembering and relaying every step.
That was the transformation Black Mountain Honey needed.
Designing The Business Before Building The System
A request for transcripts, dashboards or customer-service automation can look like a technology project. But implementing the requested features without understanding the business would have preserved the deeper dependency.
That broader problem had already become clear to Paul Boag, the UX and conversion optimisation consultant working with Black Mountain Honey. Paul had initially joined to improve the company’s digital customer experience, but his remit quickly widened. As he put it, he had become a “digital operations guy”: helping shape the move from Wix to WordPress and WooCommerce, building the first Notion scaffolding and translating Laurence’s stream of ideas into a more coherent operating model.
When the workspace and flows had to grow further, Paul brought us in to kick off our typical eight-week Notion Transformation.
We began with the operating model.
Across stakeholder interviews, workspace analysis and working sessions, we mapped how BMH’s work actually moved: where the team lost time, which decisions returned to Laurence, what knowledge customer service depended on and how the rhythm of beekeeping shaped content planning.
The same desire appeared across the team in different forms.
Zayne wanted to find an existing clip without hunting through the archive. Chrissy wanted to answer repeat questions confidently without wondering when it was appropriate to interrupt Laurence. Other collaborators wanted one calm place where they could see what mattered for their role.
Laurence wanted all of it to remain simple.
The strategic call was to build from the inside out:
- Make work, ownership and documentation legible.
- Create a common rhythm for the company’s seasonal knowledge.
- Give each person a clearer working surface.
- Add automation and AI only where the underlying handoff was understood.
Notion would become the operations and visibility layer between the people doing the work and the changing collection of tools around them.
This was less about choosing the perfect database structure than making the business understandable enough for humans and AI to participate in it.
Three Shifts In How The Business Works
1. From Founder-Held Context To Shared Organisational Knowledge
Black Mountain Honey’s most valuable asset is the practical knowledge built through years of keeping bees, supporting customers and teaching an audience. Customer service is where that knowledge meets the people who rely on it, and Laurence described exceptional service as one of the company’s defining strengths.
The work centres on a customer-service response engine in Notion. A human stars an email in Gmail to send it into the system. Code and AI then triage the request and route it to the right person: Chrissy for questions requiring order or membership lookups, and Laurence for beekeeping knowledge.
The engine prepares a draft using information already available in the Notion workspace. The assigned person reviews and approves it before the response is sent through Gmail. The original question and approved answer remain captured in Notion.
The goal is a touch it once workflow. Nothing needs to be copied and pasted between tools or recreated from memory, but the important human touchpoints remain. Nothing falls through the cracks, and each completed exchange strengthens a growing vault of customer questions and approved answers.
Over time, that vault can reduce repeated work and reveal where guidance, products or processes need to improve. It puts Black Mountain Honey on the path towards making customer service less time-consuming without losing the care that makes it distinctive.
2. From Disconnected Activity To A Seasonal Operating Rhythm
Black Mountain Honey’s work does not follow a generic quarterly calendar. Beekeeping has its own clock.
The same weeks bring recurring hive conditions, customer questions, product needs and content opportunities. Yet valuable material from previous years could remain buried while the team created something new for the same seasonal moment.
During the blueprint process, week numbers emerged as the natural organising principle for the business.
“Week numbers should be the universal tag across all of Notion—queens, nucs, content, newsletters, seasonal advice.”
This was not just a content-calendar preference. It was a way to make the company’s accumulated knowledge useful again.
Organising work around weeks means a future team member can ask what Black Mountain Honey published during this period last year, which questions customers asked and what advice became relevant. It gives the organisation a shared rhythm that reflects the actual business.
Instead of disconnected production, the team begins working from a seasonal memory.
3. From Founder Attention Spread Across Every Workflow To Founder Judgment Applied Where It Matters Most
Once the business logic was clearer, automation and AI could support it without becoming the story themselves.
A YouTube URL now starts a chain that can retrieve the transcript, preserve the timestamps and prepare descriptions, tags and call-to-action recommendations. A livestream can yield customer reviews that would otherwise remain hidden inside a long recording. Voice input can become a drafted reply and a reusable FAQ rather than another open loop Laurence needs to remember.
The individual workflow matters. The change in Laurence’s role matters more.
Instead of watching a 40-minute video again to decide where a call to action belongs, Laurence can review a grounded suggestion. Instead of answering the same customer question from scratch, Laurence can focus on the exception. Instead of manually packaging every content asset, Laurence can set the quality bar and intervene where judgment is required.
After testing the YouTube Pack, Laurence’s response was immediate:
“This is amazing! It works well and the description is spot on!”
At the wrap-up call, they explained the larger effect:
“Each little bit that’s automated or systemized within Notion is a bit that’s out of my head. And then it’s a bit I don’t have to think about, and I can focus on the other bits.”
That is the leverage: not removing Laurence from Black Mountain Honey, but making Laurence’s attention more valuable when it enters the system.
The First Meaningful Operational Layer
Eight weeks did not remove every dependency or complete every workflow.
The customer-service engine was still being tested. The knowledge library needed more input. The team was adapting to a different way of working, and some parts of the system became more complex before being simplified again.
That honesty is important. Organisational change is not finished when the configuration is finished.
But the business had moved substantially.
At the start, useful pieces existed but Laurence still held the map. By the end, the team had a shared operating model taking shape beneath the work: clearer ownership, calmer working surfaces, seasonal organisation and the first workflows capable of carrying context from one step to the next.
The practical wins made that shift visible. Transcripts arrived without the old workaround. Video packaging required less manual effort. Reviews could become reusable assets. Customer questions could begin strengthening a shared body of knowledge. Team members had clearer places to work and a better basis for taking ownership.
“When things work and they’re simple and they save me time, I’m very happy. I think you’ve left a real lasting impact on Notion there.” — Laurence Edwards
The dramatic result was not that the founder had become unnecessary.
It was that the business had started distinguishing between work that needed Laurence and work that had merely become accustomed to Laurence doing it.
What Comes Next
Black Mountain Honey deliberately chose not to move immediately into another large build.
The team needed time to work inside the new model, let the changes settle and discover where the next meaningful dependencies remained. For a highly seasonal business, that learning period matters as much as the build itself.
Laurence could already see the next stage: one livestream becoming the starting point for a connected stream of videos, clips, descriptions, lead magnets, newsletters and customer guidance—each moving through a defined process instead of relying on someone to remember what happens next.
Phase 1 did not build every branch of that future system.
It did something more foundational: it helped Black Mountain Honey understand how to keep transferring operational context out of the founder’s head and into a business the team and AI can increasingly carry.
For Laurence, that creates space for the work only Laurence can do.
For the team, it creates the conditions to take on more responsibility with confidence.
And for Black Mountain Honey, it marks the first meaningful step from a founder-held business toward an operating model that can preserve the founder’s standards without consuming the founder’s attention.
