What Vela does: nine kinds of work, one quote
By Andrew Caruso, Founder, Vela Works Canada. Last updated .
Vela Works Canada takes nine kinds of work off Canadian small-business owners: month-end financial reporting, search visibility, ads and creative, marketing automation and stack builds, lead triage and routing, weekly business briefings, margin watch, custom operations work, and website builds. Any combination is scoped into one engagement and quoted as a single agreed monthly amount in Canadian dollars, with a person reviewing every deliverable before it ships.
We scope the busywork, then build the thing that does it. Vela doesn't sell packages, and there's nothing here to add to a cart: we talk through what actually eats your week on a short call, agree a written scope, and quote one agreed monthly amount for the whole engagement. Below is the range of work we take on, described separately so you can see what's involved. Which parts end up in your scope is a conversation, not a checkout.
What's going wrong, and which work fixes it
| What you'd say out loud | The work that handles it | What comes back |
|---|---|---|
| Month-end eats my evenings | Month-end reporting | A CRA-aware profit & loss summary with plain-English variance notes, within 5 business days of close |
| Customers can't find us online | Search visibility | Keyword research tuned to Canadian search, optimized pages, and writer-ready content briefs each month |
| We post, but it never brings anyone in | Ads & creative | Short video and image ads, set up as campaigns in your own ad account, live only after you approve |
| Leads go cold because nobody follows up | Marketing automation & stack builds | Email sequences and follow-up workflows on the tools you already pay for, or a lean stack we set up for you, live only after you approve |
| New inquiries pile up faster than I can read them | Lead triage & routing | Every inquiry read, tagged, and ranked within minutes, with the reasoning attached, no auto-outreach |
| I don't know where the business stands until month-end | Weekly business briefing | A short weekly email on revenue, overdue items, and what's coming up, pulled from your existing tools |
| Some jobs seem profitable but somehow aren't | Margin watch | Job and product costs tracked against what they bring in, flagged as soon as a cost trend slips |
| The busywork is specific to my industry | Custom operations & automation | Automation built for your recurring work, plus multi-entity reporting and year-end package prep |
| Our website doesn't do its job | Website builds | A build scoped from informational site through custom storefront, with monthly upkeep after launch |
You don't have to pick a row. Most engagements span several, and working out which ones is the first thing a quote does.
Buys back time
Month-end reporting
Safe harbour for your books.
Month-end financial busywork, taken off your desk. Clean, decision-ready reports, CRA-aware and reviewed by a person before they reach you.
This is for owner-operators who lose their evenings to month-end. You keep running the business; Vela takes over the recurring financial paperwork and returns reports you can actually act on.
Every month, your numbers come back organized, summarized in plain English, and formatted with Canada Revenue Agency requirements in mind. Nothing ships without a human review.
What's included
- Month-end profit & loss summary, CRA-aware formatting
- Plain-English variance notes vs. the previous month
- Expense categorization review, scoped to your transaction volume
- Human review on every deliverable before it ships
- Delivery within 5 business days of month close
- Revision rounds agreed in your scope, not rationed by tier
Best for
Solo operators and small teams drowning in month-end paperwork.
Skeptical? Good instinct. Read a complete sample report before you spend a dollar.
Grows revenue
Search visibility
Get found. Stay on course.
SEO built for Canadian search. Real agency output without an agency retainer, so the customers already looking for what you do actually find you.
A monthly search-visibility program that makes your website work harder: researched keywords, optimized pages, and content briefs ready to hand to any writer.
The work is tuned for Canadian search intent, the way your customers actually look for you, and every recommendation arrives as a concrete, prioritized change rather than a vague audit.
What's included
- Monthly keyword research tuned to Canadian search intent
- On-page optimization across your priority pages
- Writer-ready content briefs: outline, keywords, internal links
- Schema markup recommendations for your key pages
- Monthly visibility report with prioritized next steps
Best for
Businesses with a website that should be earning more customers than it does.
Gets you noticed
Ads & creative
A signal every passing ship can read.
Short vertical video and image ads for Instagram and Facebook, written, produced, and set up as campaigns in the business's own ad account, so local customers stop scrolling past it.
Most small businesses post and hope. This is the other half: short ads made to stop a thumb in the first second, cut for the placements people actually watch, and shown to the neighbourhood the business serves rather than whoever the platform feels like reaching.
The creative, the copy, and the campaign setup are ours. The ad account, the audience, and the spend stay yours, and nothing runs until you have approved both the ad and what it costs to show it.
What's included
- Vertical video ads cut for Reels and Stories, plus static image ads
- Hooks, ad copy, and captions written for each placement
- Campaign, audience, and conversion tracking set up in your own Meta ad account
- Creative refreshed on the cadence your scope sets, before an ad goes stale
- A plain-English read-out of what ran, who saw it, and what it led to
- Nothing goes live until you approve the creative and the spend
Best for
Local businesses with something worth seeing and no time to make content.
Grows revenue
Marketing automation & stack builds
Full sail. Every channel pulling.
Email sequences, follow-up workflows, and a campaign calendar, plus the marketing tools to run them on when there are none yet, so the customers you earn don't quietly slip away.
The marketing layer makes sure nobody who reaches out gets forgotten. Sequences, follow-up rules, and a monthly campaign calendar are planned, drafted, and delivered. You approve, we ship.
It runs on the tools you already pay for. If there are none yet, we choose a lean stack sized to the business (email platform, forms, CRM, and ad tracking), set it up in accounts you own, and wire the pieces together. Nothing goes live until you've signed off on it.
What's included
- Email sequences: welcome, follow-up, and re-engagement flows
- Automated follow-up workflows mapped to your sales process
- Stack builds: choosing, setting up, and connecting your email platform, forms, CRM, and ad tracking
- Monthly campaign content calendar, planned and drafted
- Strategy review on the cadence your scope sets
- Priority turnaround where your engagement calls for it
Best for
Growing teams whose leads go cold because nobody has time to chase them.
Grows revenue
Lead triage & routing
Know who to call first.
New inquiries read, tagged, and ranked the moment they arrive, so the ones worth a same-day call don't sit behind the ones that aren't.
This is for businesses where inquiries come in faster than anyone has time to read them. Every new lead gets read and ranked as it lands: ready to buy, still deciding, or not a fit, with the reasoning attached rather than a bare score.
Nothing gets contacted automatically. You get a ranked list and the reasoning behind it each day; the calls, replies, and decisions stay yours.
What's included
- Every new inquiry read and tagged within minutes of arrival
- Ranked by buying signal, with the reasoning attached, not just a score
- One daily digest instead of a raw, unsorted inbox
- Routing rules matched to how your sales process actually works
- No automatic outreach: you decide who gets contacted and when
Best for
Businesses whose inquiries come in faster than anyone has time to read them.
Buys back time
Weekly business briefing
One email, not five tabs.
A short weekly summary of where your business stands: revenue, what's overdue, what's coming up, pulled from the tools you already use into one email.
This is for owners who start the week reconstructing their own status report from five different places: one tab for the bank, one for the calendar, one for outstanding invoices. The briefing does that reconstruction for you and lands it as one email before your week starts.
It's a summary, not a decision-maker. The point is walking into Monday already oriented, not automating what you do next.
What's included
- Weekly summary of revenue, overdue items, and upcoming work
- Pulled from your existing tools: no new dashboard to check
- Delivered on the schedule that fits your week, Monday or otherwise
- Plain-English notes on anything that looks off, not just raw numbers
- Scoped to the sources your engagement covers
Best for
Owners who start every week reconstructing their own status report from five different places.
Protects the margin
Margin watch
Catch it before it's a pattern.
Job and product costs tracked against what they actually bring in, so a quietly unprofitable job or a rising supplier price gets flagged before it becomes a quarter of losses.
This is for businesses where margin erodes slowly and nobody notices until the year-end numbers are already bad: a job that ran over, a product whose input costs crept up, a rate that hasn't kept pace with reality. Margin watch tracks cost against return on a recurring basis and flags what's slipping.
It flags; you decide what to do about it. Renegotiate, reprice, or drop it. That decision needs a person who knows the client and the relationship, not an automated rule.
What's included
- Job and product margins tracked on a recurring basis
- Flags raised as soon as a cost trend crosses your threshold, not at year-end
- Plain-English notes on what changed and why it's flagged
- Scoped to the jobs, products, or services that matter most to your bottom line
- No automatic pricing changes: every flag is a heads-up, not a decision
Best for
Businesses where margin quietly erodes on individual jobs or products long before it shows up in the year-end numbers.
The spine of the work
Custom operations & automation
Chart water no one else has mapped.
The busywork specific to your business, systematized. We map what eats your week, then build the automation that does it, tuned to your operation rather than a template.
Most of what drains an owner's week isn't a category anybody sells a product for: it's the reconciliation your industry needs, the report your franchisor demands, the follow-up your one weird sales cycle requires. This is where that goes.
Every engagement gets automation built for it. We scope the recurring work, build the process that handles the first pass, and keep a person reviewing the output. Multi-entity reporting, year-end packages, and compliance-sensitive workflows live here too.
What's included
- Automation built for your recurring work, not a template adapted to it
- Multi-entity and multi-location reporting
- Year-end financial package preparation, CRA-aware
- A written playbook so quality holds as you scale
- Quebec Law 25 data-consent documentation support
- A direct line to your Vela operator
Best for
Operations with a quirk no off-the-shelf service handles: multiple entities, franchises, compliance-sensitive workflows.
The vessel itself
Website builds
Ornate or trim, unmistakably yours.
From a fast informational site to a fully custom storefront with a backend built around your operation. You see a working prototype before you commit, then get one build fee and optional upkeep, both set in your quote.
Builds run from the small end (a fast, mobile-friendly site that says what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you) up through a working storefront with hosted checkout, SEO foundations engineered in from the first line of code, and fully custom backends with accounts, order flows, and integrations with the tools you already run.
Where your build lands is a scoping question, not a menu choice. You own the domain and the content either way: if you ever leave, the site goes with you, because upkeep is a service and not a hostage arrangement.
What's included
- Mobile-responsive, fast-loading design in your brand
- Contact and quote-request forms, delivered to your inbox
- Hosted checkout when you sell online: card data stays with the payment provider
- SEO foundations: per-page metadata, structured data, sitemap, canonical URLs
- Custom backend where you need one: accounts, order flows, integrations
- Managed hosting on Vercel with SSL, plus optional monthly upkeep with a two business day response time on updates and fixes
Best for
Businesses that need a site that earns its keep, not a brochure that sits there.
Why this work is worth handing off
Canadian small businesses spent 735 hours on regulatory compliance in 2024, and 256 of those hours (roughly 32 business days) went to red tape rather than anything productive, according to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. The smallest businesses carry the heaviest per-person share of it, which is exactly the position an owner-operator is in.
Some of that time is genuinely non-negotiable. The Canada Revenue Agency requires businesses to keep records and supporting documents for six years from the end of the last tax year they relate to, and destroying them earlier needs written permission. Work that has to happen anyway is the work most worth taking off your desk, which is why the reporting is formatted with those requirements in mind rather than tidied up afterwards.
How much does Vela cost? Quoted per business, settled once agreed
Vela is quoted per engagement: one agreed monthly amount in Canadian dollars, covering whatever the written scope says, with no setup fee and no long-term contract. We reply to your first message within two business days, and you get that figure once we have talked it through (and, for a website, once you have approved a prototype). It is a ceiling rather than an estimate.
There is no price list on this page, and that is deliberate. Two businesses asking for “month-end reporting” can be a three-hour job and a three-day one. Publishing one figure would mean quoting you a number we'd have to walk back the moment we saw your books.
Instead: you tell us what's eating your week, we get on a short call to understand it, and then we come back with a written scope and one agreed monthly amount in Canadian dollars. For a website build, you see a working prototype first and we revise it until you like it, and only then do we quote. That figure is the ceiling, not an estimate. It doesn't drift after you sign, and anything outside the scope gets quoted separately before any work starts.
What we scope on
Volume
How many transactions, products, pages, or entities the work actually covers. This moves the number more than anything else.
Cadence
Monthly, quarterly, or a one-time build. Recurring work is priced as an agreed monthly amount; builds are priced once, with upkeep separate.
Starting condition
A clean set of books and a tidy site cost less to take over than a two-year backlog. Catch-up work is quoted separately and said out loud.
Deadlines
A fiscal year-end in six weeks is a different job from the same work with six months of runway. Tight timelines are quotable, not surcharged in secret.
No setup fees
Onboarding is part of the engagement, not a line item bolted onto month one.
No long-term contract
Engagements run month to month and cancel with 30 days' notice.
Call first, quote second
We start with a short call to understand the problem. For a website, you see a working prototype before any quote, so you know what you are agreeing to.
Fair questions about the work
My books are a mess. Can you still start?
- Yes. Plan on the first month including some catch-up, and anything we can't categorize confidently gets flagged and asked about rather than guessed. If the backlog is deep, the cleanup is priced separately in your quote, honestly and before any work starts.
What do you need from me each month?
- One email: your transaction data pasted as a CSV or shared as a link, ideally with the memo column included. That's the whole job on your side. The report comes back within five business days.
Does this replace my accountant?
- No, and it isn't meant to. Vela produces management-use reports that make your numbers legible month to month. Your CPA still handles year-end and tax, and gets cleaner inputs because of us.
Can you guarantee rankings?
- No, and nobody honestly can. What we deliver is the work search engines reward: researched keywords, optimized pages, structured data, and briefs. The site will never be the reason you don't rank.
Do you make the website changes, or do I?
- We do, if you invite us as a collaborator on your website platform (takes about two minutes, revocable anytime). Prefer to keep the keys? We send every change ready to paste instead.
Who writes the actual articles?
- You get writer-ready briefs: outline, keywords, internal links. You can hand them to any writer, write them yourself, or have the writing itself scoped into your engagement.
Do you need footage from me?
- No, though it helps. We can cut ads from your own phone footage and photos, or produce footage to a brief. Anything generated rather than filmed is labelled as generated when we hand it over, and every ad follows the platform's own disclosure rules.
Who pays for the ad spend?
- You do, directly to the platform, from your own ad account. Our quote covers making and managing the ads and never includes or marks up the spend, so the budget you set is what the platform receives.
Can I see an example first?
- Yes. The Bellwood & Ash case study at velaworks.ca/work/bellwood-ash includes a 10-second Instagram ad made for our fictional demo client, with notes on why it is built the way it is.
Which email platform do the sequences run on?
- Yours: Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Brevo, or whatever you already pay for. We write the sequences and the if/then rules, set them up in your account, and you approve before anything goes live.
Do you set up the tools, or just use them?
- Both. If you already pay for an email platform or CRM, we build on it. If you don't, we recommend a lean stack sized to your business, set it up in accounts you own, and connect it to your forms and your ad account, so nothing is ever locked inside a system of ours.
Do emails go out without my approval?
- Never on setup. New sequences and campaigns are approved by you before activation; once a flow is running, it runs on the rules you approved.
What if I don't have an email list yet?
- Then we start there: the first month focuses on capture (forms, lead magnets, follow-up on quote requests) so the sequences have someone to talk to. We'll be upfront that results build over months, not days.
Does this contact leads automatically?
- No. It reads, tags, and ranks; every reply or call is still made by you or your team. We're sorting the inbox, not replacing the conversation.
What tools does this plug into?
- Wherever your leads already land: your contact form, a shared inbox, or your CRM. We connect to what you have rather than asking you to move to something new.
What if two leads look equally urgent?
- The ranking comes with the reasoning attached, not just a score, so you can make the judgment call yourself when it's close.
What sources does the briefing pull from?
- Whatever you already use for money and scheduling: your accounting software, invoicing tool, and calendar. We connect to your existing setup rather than asking you to adopt a new one.
Is this the same as the month-end report?
- No. Month-end reporting is a finished, reviewed financial report; the weekly briefing is a short pulse check to start your week oriented. Businesses use one or both.
Can I change what it covers?
- Yes. What goes in the briefing is set in your scope, and you can adjust it as what matters to you changes.
Does this change my prices automatically?
- No. It flags what's slipping and why; whether to reprice, renegotiate with a supplier, or drop a job stays your call. That decision needs to account for the relationship, not just the number.
What data do you need from me?
- Your job costs or product costs and what they're billed or sold at. If that already lives in your accounting or job-costing software, we connect to it directly.
How is this different from the month-end report?
- Month-end reporting looks backward at the whole business. Margin watch watches specific jobs or products continuously and flags problems as they develop, not after the month closes.
How does scoping work?
- On a short call, with email to follow up: you describe the entities, volumes, and deadlines; we come back with an agreed monthly amount and a written scope. The quote is the ceiling, and there's no drift after signing.
What does 'multi-entity' actually include?
- Separate books per entity plus a consolidated view, with inter-entity transactions flagged for elimination rather than double-counted. If your structure has quirks, they go in the scope document explicitly.
What's the Quebec Law 25 support, concretely?
- Documentation help: data-consent language for your client agreements, a record of what data we process and why, and handling practices aligned with Law 25's requirements. It's compliance paperwork support, not legal advice, and we say so.
Who owns the website?
- You do: the domain, the content, all of it. If you ever leave, the site goes with you; upkeep is a service, not a hostage arrangement.
How do payments work if I sell online?
- Through a hosted provider like Stripe: the customer pays on the provider's secure page, the provider takes its standard processing fee (paid to them, not us), and the money lands in your account. Your site never touches card numbers.
Can the price change once we start?
- Not on our side. Your quote sets the figure. Scope changes you request mid-build are quoted separately before any work happens, never invoiced as a surprise.
Do I see anything before I commit?
- Yes. After a short call to understand your business, we build a quick working prototype and send it over. You react to it, we revise until it feels right, and only then do we quote the build.
How does upkeep work?
- It is optional. Upkeep is either a monthly plan with a two business day response time on updates and fixes, or one-off changes quoted as they come up. Your site is hosted on Vercel either way.
Can you migrate my existing site?
- Where your current platform allows export, yes: content, product data, and images port over as part of the build. We audit what you have first and flag anything that can't move cleanly before you commit.
Sources
- Canada's Red Tape Report: The Cost of Regulation to Small Business (January 2025). Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Figures checked August 2026.
- Where to keep your records, for how long, and how to request permission to destroy them early. Canada Revenue Agency. Figures checked August 2026.
Tell us what's eating your week
One quote covers the whole engagement, and the quote page drafts the email for you. We'll reply within two business days to set up a short call, then follow with a written scope and an agreed figure.
Request a quote