Stanley Young Consulting
Funding bids for halls and charities. Practical AI help for small businesses.
Herefordshire · Leominster · Kington · Hereford · the Welsh border
Two lines of work, both local, both priced below. One is writing funding applications for village halls, churches and small charities. The other is getting AI working properly inside businesses of one to five people.
No jargon, no course to sit through, no software to buy from me. Prices don't change depending on who's asking.
Halls, churches and small charities
Most halls are run by volunteers who have neither the time nor the practice to write a funding application, so the money sits there unclaimed year after year.
I'm treasurer of two parish halls and I write their bids. I know what the forms want, what makes an assessor stop reading, and how to say in four hundred words what a committee has been trying to say for a year.
Under £5,000
The smaller pots. Parish precept, town council grants, Awards for All, a local trust. Usually one form, one budget and a couple of conversations with your committee.
Ask about a bidThe bigger pots
Anything larger or more involved. A proper case for support, the budget built and checked, the evidence pulled together, the outcomes written the way funders want to read them.
Ask about a bidPaid on submission, not on outcome. No funder gives a guarantee and neither will I. What I will do is tell you before I start if I don't think the bid will land, because I'd rather say that than take your money for a form that was never going to win.
My own two halls I do unpaid, as treasurer. Everybody else pays. If your hall has been meaning to apply for something for two years and never quite got to it, that's the conversation to have.
Businesses of one to five people
Most of the businesses I work with are busy, aren't technical, and have heard AI might save them time without anyone showing them how.
That's the whole job. I sit down with you and get it running on your actual work rather than a demo.
Start here
Two hours, at your place or on a call. You finish with it set up, your business written down in a form the AI understands, and three jobs it now does for you.
Book a setup sessionThe quicker route
Three to four hours in one sitting, for anyone who'd rather get it done than spread it out. Everything in the setup session, plus we build out whatever is currently eating your week.
Book a half daySome people carry on at £95 a month. An hour together, email in between when you get stuck, and your setup kept current as your work changes and as the software does.
Plenty of people don't, and run with it perfectly well on their own. That's a good outcome, so I'd rather you took the setup session and decided afterwards than signed up to anything now.
The monthly has no contract. One month's notice, whenever you like, no reason needed.
The setup session isn't a sales pitch for the monthly. Plenty of people take it once and run with it. That's the point.
Travel is free within half an hour of Pembridge. Further than that and we'll do it on a call, which works just as well.
You pay the software company separately for the AI itself. I'll tell you what that costs, and whether you need the paid version at all, before you commit to anything with me.
Any hall, church or small charity. Being treasurer at two of them is why I know the forms, not a limit on who I'll work for.
You've still paid for the work, same as you would a solicitor whose case doesn't go your way. Most funders will tell you why they said no, and a second application with that feedback folded in stands a much better chance.
No. If you can use a phone and send an email, you can do this. Nobody I've worked with has needed anything beyond that.
It depends what's slow. Usually it's quotes, invoice chasing, the emails you put off, writing the same thing for the fifteenth time, or making sense of a pile of paperwork. We start with whatever you dread on a Monday.
Claude. There are others and they're perfectly good. I teach the one I use every day, so when it does something odd I can tell you why rather than guess.
Not at the size of business I work with. It replaces the two hours on a Sunday night you spend on admin nobody pays you for.
Then stop. I'd rather you left after a month than paid for something you aren't opening. Say so and it ends.
Stanley Young. Twenty-five years as a senior executive in financial markets before I retired to Herefordshire: partner at Accenture, and roles at the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange.
Most of that career was spent getting entire industries to change how they worked. It turns out to be the same problem as getting a small business or a hall committee to change how it works, with more zeros on the end and worse coffee.
I live in Pembridge. I'm treasurer at two parish halls and a trustee of a dyslexia charity, so you'll probably have seen me at something. If you're nearby, I'll come to you.