--- title: "Weekly inventory: 2.5 hours → 31 minutes, by phone." date: 2026-05-28 canonical: https://mysickbuilds.com/case-studies/mooberry-farms/ --- ## The receipts, before the story. **Time saved per inventory session: 2.5h → 31 min.** From 90 minutes in the freezer + 60 minutes of someone retyping it, to one phone call. First run, no practice. - **Annual time recovered: ~104 hrs/yr.** 2 hrs/week × 52 weeks. Ryan now gets **two and a half work weeks** back. - **People in workflow: 3 → 1.** Helper and mother-in-law both freed up. - **Steps in workflow: 4 → 1.** One phone call. Same numbers, touched once. > "She sounds like my banker, which I can't really get over." > > *Ryan · Owner, MooBerry Farms* ## Who, what, and how long. - **Client:** MooBerry Farms - **Industry:** Direct-to-consumer cattle farm - **The ask:** Eliminate the 2.5-hour weekly inventory bottleneck. - **What we built:** A custom voice agent ("Betty") that takes inventory by phone and syncs to Google Sheets + Square POS. - **Stack:** ElevenLabs · n8n · Google Sheets · Square POS · Email - **Timeline:** A few weekends ## A clipboard, a mother-in-law, and 2.5 hours every week. Ryan runs a family cattle farm in Tennessee. He breaks down whole cows into thirteen different cuts and sells direct through a farm store and an online Square shop. The product is excellent. The back office, until recently, was a brick wall. Every week, inventory went like this. Ryan stood in the freezer and weighed every cut, one by one, reading each weight out loud. A second person wrote every number down on *whatever paper was nearby*: sometimes a clipboard, sometimes the back of a napkin, sometimes the back of an envelope. Then that paper went to his mother-in-law. She typed every weight into an Excel spreadsheet. That spreadsheet fed Square POS, which generated the purchase order. **Three people. Four steps. The same numbers, touched twice.** > "We always gravitate back towards paper and pencil. That's how we rock. We count, we write down, we go to a computer, we type it again into a spreadsheet." > > *Ryan · MooBerry Farms* ### Pain points - Same numbers entered twice: once on paper, once in Excel. - Three people locked into the workflow every single week. - Yield % unknown for a day or more after inventory. - A single typo could silently corrupt Square inventory. - Workflow broke entirely whenever someone got sick. **Cost of inaction: ~104 hrs/yr.** 2.5 hrs every week. Three people. Half a workday gone, every single week, before anything ever made it onto the storefront. ## Meet Betty, the voice agent who answers MooBerry's phone. Betty lives behind a single phone number. She answers in a warm, slightly Southern voice. She is trained specifically for the way Ryan does inventory: meat types, box numbers, weights. And she keeps up with him as fast as he can talk. When Ryan finishes a box, Betty repeats the count, the total weight, and asks if it is correct. When he finishes the session, she gives him a grand total and tells him she's pushing everything to Google Sheets. There is no app. There is no spreadsheet to open. There is no second person typing. - **Answers the phone** in Ryan's voice: warm, Southern, conversational. Tuned for noisy freezer audio. - **Captures structured data** in real time: cut, box, weight, from natural speech. No app, no form. - **Confirms every box** out loud before moving on. Self-correcting on the call. - **Writes to the systems Ryan already uses:** Google Sheets, Square POS, email summary. Automatically. ## Hear Betty answer the phone. A short clip from Ryan's first inventory call. Listen to how Betty handles the dictation, confirms the box, and catches the 0.80-vs-80 mistake in real time. ## Four steps Ryan sees. Everything else, in the background. 1. **Ryan calls Betty.** One phone number. Speaker on, freezer door open. Betty picks up: "MooBerry Farms, this is Betty. Are you ready to record some inventory?" 2. **Ryan dictates a box.** Meat type, box number, then every weight off the scale. As fast as he can talk. Betty keeps up. No app, no form, no fields. 3. **Betty confirms.** After each box: "That's 6 ribeyes, 4.81 pounds total. Sound right?" She catches mishears in real time. Ryan corrects on the call. 4. **Betty closes out.** When inventory is done: "Total weight recorded today is 183.58 pounds. I'll send this to the Google Sheet now." That is the whole workflow. ### Four things Betty is doing while Ryan talks. - Every weight written to Ryan's existing Google Sheet: same shape, same columns, untouched. - Summary email to Ryan with totals by box, by cut, and a grand total for the session. - New inventory pushed to Square POS so the online storefront matches the freezer. - Full transcript saved for every call: error-traceable, audit-friendly. ## Ryan said "0.80 pounds." Betty heard "80 pounds." Halfway through the first call, Ryan asked Betty to add one more chuck eye steak to the previous box. He said the weight was "0.80 pounds." She heard "80 pounds." On the old paper system, nobody would have caught it. The error would have rolled through the spreadsheet, into Square, and onto the storefront. Customers would have seen impossible inventory levels for days. Instead, Ryan looked at the running total Betty was building, saw the number was wrong, and corrected her in real time. She updated the entry on the spot. The rest of the inventory kept moving forward, untouched. > "We corrected it in real time, and it didn't throw off the rest of the spreadsheet. **That was incredible.**" > > *Ryan · MooBerry Farms* ## The full flow, start to finish. One phone call in. Three systems updated. The dashboard MSB operates on Ryan's behalf: every call's status, impact, and history. **Impact since May 2026:** - **People in workflow:** 3 → 1 - **Inventory time:** ~31 min, first run - **Data lag:** real-time, vs 3 days ## Every metric, side by side. - **Time per inventory session:** ~2.5 hours → ~31 minutes, first try. - **People required:** 3 → 1. - **Steps in workflow:** 4 → 1. One call. - **Time until yield % is known:** a day or more → within 15 minutes, same evening. - **Risk of typo corrupting Square:** high and silent → self-correcting, caught on the call. - **Workflow if someone is sick:** stops entirely → unaffected, 24/7. ## Inexpensive to run. Built to last. No enterprise software. No SaaS sprawl. Just one phone number that does the work of several people, running on tools that stay cheap to operate at the scale of a small farm. - **Voice layer · ElevenLabs.** Custom persona ("Betty"), tuned for noisy freezer rooms and cooler-fan audio. - **Extraction · OpenAI: ChatGPT.** Turns each transcript into strict JSON. Normalizes spoken numbers and reconciles every box, cut, and weight into clean totals. - **Orchestration · n8n.** Parses every transcript. Extracts cuts, boxes, and weights. Routes structured data. - **System of record · Google Sheets.** Ryan's existing sheet: same shape, same columns. Nothing on his side had to change. - **Notifications · Email.** Summary with totals by box, by cut, and a grand total. Delivered within minutes of call end. - **Inventory sync · Square API.** Pushes new counts to the storefront: online shop always matches the freezer. - **Reliability · Live error correction.** Self-correcting during the call. Full transcript backup of every conversation. ## Ryan's words. Recommend to another farm? **Without question.** > "Cory, with My Sick Builds, came to us. He's a customer of ours. He came over to the store one day and said, where are your biggest pain points? What do you do repetitively that you don't like doing?" > > "Every week, it's the inventorying of meats. He built Betty to receive our inventory and eliminate a pain point. The worst part of our job, other than snowstorms. **He fixed that problem.**" > > "She always shows up for work. She doesn't get sick. It can be 10 o'clock at night and she's going to answer that phone." > > *Ryan · Owner, MooBerry Farms* **For anyone still on the fence:** > "Keep your skepticism, but don't let it stop you from buying back time. Use technology to save you time so you can do things you enjoy more."