What part of your business is stuck?
Start there, before anyone sells you AI. I'm Madina Umbetova: 20+ years running businesses and commercial teams, and I build the systems that fix them myself.
Where it usually starts
What I would do
Diagnose first
Count the calls you miss in a normal week, then the jobs they were worth. Pikettli is what I built for exactly this.
See Pikettli ↗You don't need to launch AI. You need one broken part fixed.
"Everyone is doing AI, so I should too." "I hired an agency, and they never understood my business." If that sounds familiar, the method starts somewhere else: with where your business loses money or time today. Every stage ends with a decision: go, adjust or stop.
- 01
Diagnose
Find where the business loses money or time today, and put a number on it.
- 02
Redesign
Decide how that part of the business should run, before anything gets built.
- 03
Architect
Choose the simplest fix. Sometimes that means no AI at all.
- 04
Build
A working version you can open and try, tested on realistic cases first.
- 05
Deploy
It goes into the tools your team already uses, asks before anything important, and can be switched off.
- 06
Prove
Compare against the starting number, then keep it, adjust it or stop it.
Systems I built. Open them.
Each one fixes a part of a business that was losing enquiries, calls or time.
Treffli
Enquiries arrive while you are busy with a customer, and some of them never get an answer.
Open Treffli ↗ Live product · GermanPikettli
You are on a ladder when the phone rings, and the job goes to whoever picks up first.
Open Pikettli ↗ Live demoVoice front desk
Visitors have a question after hours and nobody is there to answer it.
Read how it works → Live demo · GermanSofortli reachability check
You cannot tell how easy it is for a new customer to find and contact your salon.
Run the check ↗One method every week.
Written by an operator, for operators. One method you can actually build, drawn from 20+ years running commercial portfolios and the last year spent building AI tools instead of briefing them out.
Subscribe once. Every Sunday, one method you can use.
Substack manages the subscription. The welcome email brings the link to the library: every free resource in one place, and each new one lands there first.
I work where commercial reality meets digital delivery.
I'm Madina Umbetova. 20+ years running portfolios and turnarounds across crop protection, healthcare, chemicals, and distribution, from Country GM in Kazakhstan to a $0.8bn global portfolio today, based in Basel, Switzerland.
For years, having an idea was expensive. You wrote a brief, waited in a queue, paid an agency or a consultant, and got back something close to what you meant. That gap closed last year. I now build my own working tools inside Claude on a weekend, against a clear method. The Closed Gap is where I share what I build and how, so senior leaders can do the same: in agriculture today, transferable anywhere, because the problem is the same everywhere.