About
I am not an agency. I am someone who runs a shop.
Ed Howe, Oxford. Founder of Runs Itself, and of greendog.pet.
I am Ed Howe, based in Oxford. I make and sell British handmade dog collars and leads at greendog.pet, on my own. No staff, no warehouse, no marketing department.
That business runs on the same things I would build for you: a fast website I own, a Google presence that brings people in, email that follows up without me remembering to, and a set of automations doing the jobs I used to do at eleven at night.
It works. Revenue is up 24.6% year on year and repeat custom went from a quarter of customers to over a third. More to the point, for five months of last year I was also running operations for a restaurant, thirty hours a week, and the shop still grew 32% over that stretch. A business that only grows when you are watching it is a job, not a business.
I also built that restaurant an HR and staff portal: rotas, shift swaps, hours, overtime, holiday accrual, pay per period, and gross profit tracking on wet and dry for the management side. So when I say custom internal tools, I mean things people clock into on a Saturday night, not a demo.
Because friends who run good businesses kept ringing me about AI, and because they were being sold websites by people with no intention of teaching them anything. The gap is not technology. It is that nobody sensible is explaining it to businesses this size in plain English at a price they can justify.
- I do not do photography, video or logo design. I will introduce you to people who do.
- I take a small number of retainer clients, so the diary stays honest.
- If AI is the wrong answer to your problem, I will say so and charge you nothing more.
The name
Runs Itself is a promise, not a boast. The work is finished when the machine keeps going without either of us standing over it.