Who should own the automation, me or the agency I'm renting seats from?

Question

My agency spent three months building out my renovation pipeline inside their own stack. Draw requests, lien waiver chasing, subcontractor check-ins, all of it running on their automation platform with their AI intake sitting in front of my email. It works better than what I had. It also means the process now lives at their company, and my SOPs are documents in their workspace.

When I asked what leaving looks like, the answer was that I'd get an export of the data and could rebuild the workflows myself. So the data is mine and the machine is theirs.

The argument for letting them own it: this is what I'm paying a service business for. They amortize the build across clients, they maintain it, and I get a better version than I'd build alone because I'm not a systems person, I'm a renovation guy.

The argument for owning it: the workflow is the thing that makes my seats productive. If they own it, my switching cost goes up every month and my rate negotiation gets weaker. A bill rate increase two years from now isn't really negotiable when leaving means rebuilding nine months of process.

I've also seen the third version, where the client owns the tooling and the agency just supplies bodies who log into it. Cheaper per hour, and every improvement is on me.

Where would you land if you were signing this year?

renee_dubois · Answer

Split, and the split I'd draw is documentation. Even if their platform runs the process, the written SOP should exist in a doc you own, updated monthly, in plain language a new person could follow. That's a cheap insurance policy. I've got 22 units and my whole operating manual is a shared folder, nothing clever, and it's survived two vendor changes.

mikeoconnell7 · Answer

We build in our own stack because maintaining twelve clients' bespoke systems is unaffordable, not because we want lock-in. I'd rather tell you that plainly than pretend. What I do offer is a written commitment that on exit we hand over the workflow definitions in readable form, so you get logic and not just rows.

ryanmck27 · Answer

@lantern would you actually put that in the contract though? Because the answer everyone gives verbally is yes and the answer in the MSA is usually silence.

marcus_hale41 · Answer

@harrow the switching cost point is the real one and it's measurable. Ask them for the exit terms before you sign anything else, and price the rebuild. Nine months of process at whatever a contractor would charge to reimplement it, call it a number. If that number is bigger than a year of fees, you have already handed them your renegotiating position. I've walked from managers over exactly this.

luis_carrera · Answer

Own the AI intake in front of your own email, at minimum. That's the piece touching your counterparties and your inbox history. Everything downstream of it is more replaceable than it feels.

kevin_lombard · Answer

So the data is the records, the workflow is the instructions for what happens to the records, and the argument is about who keeps the instructions. Is that right?

devon_pierce · Answer

@juniper yes, and add one thing. The instructions are worth more than the records, because the records only tell you what happened and the instructions tell your next hire what to do tomorrow. @harrow, lien waiver chasing is a place where a missed step costs real money, so I'd want that specific sequence written down somewhere I control regardless of what the rest of the answer is.

Who should own the automation, me or the agency I'm renting seats from?

7 replies