Tried every AI tool. Still doing it all yourself?
Hours Back Lab exists because Sydney service businesses deserve AI that fits how they actually work. Safe, owned, and built into your operations. Not enterprise overhead grafted onto a growing team.
The tool itself is ordinary. The operational design around it is not.
Linda Cunningham.
I'm based in the Hawkesbury, NSW. After twenty years delivering enterprise digital programs across banking, MedTech, transport, and infrastructure, I built Hours Back Lab to bring that same discipline to Sydney service businesses.
Today Hours Back Lab configures AI systems that handle voice, social, and search for growing service businesses across Australia. The work is simple to describe and harder to do, set up AI as a managed team member, with a role, a brief, and a place in the operations.
I'm also the author of The AI Career Book, winner of the Literary Titan Gold Book Award (2025). I write and teach about AI as a managed team member, not a tool.
“We build for the way you actually work, not a fantasy version of it.”
A short, deliberate engagement. Then your team owns the system.
Honest scoping
We start with what's actually broken, not what we want to sell. If a system isn't worth building yet, we tell you.
Fixed scope, fixed price
Australian dollars. Quoted before we start, adjusted only if you change the scope. No surprises in week three.
Working handover
Documented systems, recorded walkthroughs, training where it helps. Your team can run what we built without us in the room.
Yours to own
Source code, schemas, playbooks, all yours. Ongoing management is available if you want it, never assumed.
- Disclose every AI tool in your stack.
- Hand over playbooks you can actually run.
- Build systems you own, not subscriptions.
- Tell you when a system isn't worth building.
- Stay small. Stay deliberate.
- Build hustle-shaped tools.
- Promise outcomes only you can drive.
- Lock you into proprietary platforms.
- Ghostwrite your founder voice.
- Take on work we can't ship well.