We build the systems that make a small business tick.
Caldern designs and builds automations, assistants and internal tools around how work actually moves through your business: enquiry, job, invoice, review. Fixed prices, written quotes, and every price on this page.
A phone call about how your work runs. Not a sales pitch.
Your business, drawn as a system
Enquiry
The call, the message, the form. Answered, taken down, never lost.
Job
Booked, scheduled and tracked in the diary and tools you already use.
Invoice
Raised on time, chased politely, paid sooner.
Review
Asked for while the work's still fresh. Reputation, compounding.
The joints between those boxes are where jobs and money leak. That's what we build: the connections. Designed around your business, not a template.
01 What we build
Three kinds of build. All fixed price.
Everything is quoted in writing before work starts. No hourly rates, no day rates, no meter running.
Customer follow-up systems
Enquiries answered, details taken, jobs booked, quotes chased, invoices nudged, reviews requested. All running quietly behind your existing phone and diary.
Like: a system that answers when a customer rings while you're mid-job, books a callback slot, and texts you the details. (Illustrative: what a typical build does, not a client result.)
Internal tools
Job trackers, quoting tools, dashboards, mini-CRMs. Small pieces of software built around how your business actually runs, instead of forcing your business into off-the-shelf software.
Like: a quoting tool that knows your materials, margins and travel time, so a quote takes four minutes instead of an evening. (Illustrative.)
Automations between your apps
The copy-paste jobs between the tools you already pay for: enquiry to CRM, job sheet to invoice, invoice to accounts. Done automatically, every time, without anyone remembering.
Like: a finished job triggering the invoice, the payment reminder and the review request, with nothing typed twice. (Illustrative.)
02 Flagship
The Whole Job. Our productised system for trades.
One ready-made Caldern build, installed for plumbers, electricians, builders and roofers. It runs a job end to end, and it shows you exactly what a Caldern system looks like.
- Calls answered, details takenWhat's the job, where, how urgent. Never a price. You always give the quote.
- Booked into your existing diaryThe customer gets a real callback time, not "someone will be in touch".
- Quotes chased to a yes or a noPolite follow-up until there's an answer. No more silence.
- Invoices nudgedReminders go out so you get paid without playing bad cop.
- Reviews requestedOne text to the happy customer while the job's still fresh.
- Summaries by text and emailNo app. No portal. Nothing to log into.
Flat, all-in price
The Whole Job is the one thing we sell at a flat all-in rate: no per-minute charges, no usage surprises.
£495 install + £397/mo
3-month minimum, then rolling monthly.
3 founding places: the first three North East trades businesses pay £297/month, the install fee is waived, and the rate is held permanently.
03 Rules we build by
Three rules, from what buyers actually complain about.
We never auto-quote
No system of ours gives your customer a price. Customers hate robot prices and so do the businesses that get burned by them. We capture the job; you give the number.
No meters, no surprises
Fixed quotes on builds. A flat all-in rate on The Whole Job. Where a custom build uses third-party services, the usage cost is passed through at cost and shown to you. Never marked up, never hidden.
No portals forced on you
Systems fit how you already work. If your diary is a paper book and a phone, we build to that. You'll never be made to learn software to use something we built.
04 Pricing
Every price, on the page.
Most firms doing this work make you book a call to hear a number. Ours are published: more capable than the template-bot shops, a tenth of the dev-shop ticket. And the price is on the page.
The flagship
The Whole Job: for trades businesses
Calls answered, jobs booked with a real callback time, quotes chased, invoices nudged, reviews requested. Summaries by text and email. No app, no portal.
- Flat all-in price: no per-minute charges, no usage surprises
- We never auto-quote: you always give the price
- Built into the diary and phone you already use
£397/month
+ £495 one-off install. 3-month minimum, then rolling monthly.
3 founding places: £297/month for the first three North East trades businesses. Install fee waived. Rate held permanently.
Start here: the systems audit
£450 fixed
Half a day, on site in the North East or remote. We walk your process end to end, find where jobs and money leak, and you get a written shortlist of the three to five highest-value automations, each with a fixed quote.
Credited in full against any build over £1,500 started within 60 days.
Custom builds: fixed price, quoted in writing
Automations
The copy-paste work between your apps, done automatically. Enquiry to CRM, job to invoice, invoice to accounts.
from £1,500most land £2,000–£4,000
Assistants that answer for you
Trained on your business, wired into your diary and CRM. Takes enquiries properly and books real slots, not a template widget pasted on a website.
from £1,800most land £2,000–£3,500
Small internal systems
Job trackers, quoting tools, dashboards, mini-CRMs, built around how your business runs.
from £3,000most land £3,500–£6,500
No hourly rates. No day rates. You get a written fixed quote before any work starts, and that's the price.
After the build: every system leaves on a retainer
We don't build and disappear. Every build goes live on one of these: rolling monthly, 30 days' notice.
Hosting
£97/mo
- Hosting, monitoring and backups
- Updates kept current
- Break-fix of what we built
- Monthly health report
No change time included. Changes quoted or billed at £75/hr.
Support
£297/mo
- Everything in Hosting
- Up to 2 hours of changes a month
- Next-business-day response
- Quarterly review call
For systems that need occasional tweaks as the business changes.
Improve
£497/mo
- Everything in Hosting
- Up to 5 hours a month, including one shipped improvement every month
- Same-day response on critical issues
- Monthly review call
For businesses that want the system getting better every month.
The small print, in normal-sized print
- Retainer hours don't roll over month to month.
- Work beyond your included hours: £75/hr, agreed before it's done.
- Out-of-hours emergency work: £120/hr.
- On custom builds, third-party service usage (for example, the AI models an assistant runs on) is passed through at cost. Shown on the invoice, never marked up.
- Flat all-in pricing is exclusive to The Whole Job: nothing passed through, nothing metered.
05 Straight with you
Be one of our first testimonials.
Caldern is new, and we won't pretend otherwise: there are no invented reviews on this page and there never will be. But being early cuts in your favour. Our first clients aren't ticket numbers in a queue. They're the businesses our reputation gets built on, which means we can't afford to do you a mediocre job.
You matter more here than anywhere
At a big provider you're one account in thousands. Here, you're one of three, and the person answering you is the person who built your system. Something's wrong, you tell Samuel, it gets fixed. There's no queue to sit in and nobody to be passed to.
Our interests are yours
Every early client is the marketing. If your system doesn't earn its keep, we've got nothing to show the next tradesperson. So it will. You're not taking a chance on us nearly as much as we're staking everything on you.
The founding rate, held
The first three Whole Job clients pay £297/month and keep it. When the standard rate is £397, yours still says £297: our thanks for being first. And with your consent, your real, named results become the proof that replaces this section.
06 About
Built by someone who's run operations, not just written code.
Caldern is run by Samuel Jordan, from the North East of England. Before building systems he spent years inside operations: workforce planning for a national retailer, energy, contact centres. He watched how work moves through a business and where it gets dropped.
That's the design philosophy: start from how the work actually flows, from enquiry to job to invoice to review, and build the system around it. The thinking-outside-the-box part is the job: you're paying for someone to look at your business and make it tick, not to install a template.
Under the hood it's serious kit: Flowise, Make.com, infrastructure we host and manage ourselves. But you'll only ever deal with the part that matters: does the phone get answered, does the job get booked, does the invoice go out.
Local means local. In Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham and Teesside, audits and installs happen in person. Further afield, we work remotely and it works just as well.
07 Questions
Fair questions, straight answers.
Will it sound robotic to my customers?
You hear it before your customers do. Nothing goes live until you've signed off on how it sounds and what it says. It answers politely, takes the job details and gives a real callback time. What customers remember is that someone answered and they know when you're ringing back.
What happens if it breaks?
That's what the retainer is for. Every build leaves on one, so there's always someone responsible for the thing you're relying on: monitoring, backups and break-fix on Hosting; next-business-day response on Support; same-day on critical issues with Improve. You're never left holding software nobody looks after.
Do I need to learn any software?
No. Systems fit how you already work: summaries arrive by text and email, bookings land in the diary you already use, and changes are made by us. If you want a dashboard, we'll build you one; you'll never be forced into one.
What happens to my customers' data?
It stays yours. We collect only what's needed to handle the enquiry: name, contact details, the job. We never sell or share it, and we handle it under UK GDPR. If a customer asks to be deleted, they're deleted. The detail is in our privacy policy, written in plain English.
Can I cancel?
Retainers are rolling monthly with 30 days' notice. Leave whenever it stops earning its keep. The Whole Job has a 3-month minimum first (it takes that long to bed in and prove itself), then it rolls monthly too. That's the only tie-in anywhere, and now you know about it.
Twenty minutes on the phone. You'll know where your business leaks.
A free call with Samuel about how work moves through your business. If we can't help, we'll say so and you've lost twenty minutes.
Book a free 20-minute call