I Built a Second Business — Here’s Why (and What It Means for You)
By Michael Nelson
If you’ve been following Five Towers Media for a while, you probably know that I’m not someone who sits still. We’ve spent the last several years helping small and mid-size businesses across the Capital Region build audiences, tell their stories, and grow. But somewhere along the way, I kept running into the same problem — one that marketing alone couldn’t fix.
The businesses we work with are busy. Not “we need more leads” busy. Deep-in-the-weeds, can’t-come-up-for-air busy. Invoicing done by hand. Follow-ups falling through the cracks. Reports assembled from six different spreadsheets every month. Work that people were doing because it had to get done — not because it was the best use of their time or talent.
That’s the problem Foundry 5 is built to solve.
What Is Foundry 5?
Foundry 5 is a Saratoga Springs-based business automation company built for small businesses ready to work smarter. The work is straightforward: we identify one manual process that’s costing a small business time, money, or people — scope it exactly — and automate it end-to-end. Fixed scope. Fixed price. Done in two to three weeks.
The kinds of workflows we’re talking about include things like:
- Invoicing and payment follow-up that currently lives in someone’s inbox
- Lead intake that requires a person to copy data from a form into a CRM
- Client onboarding steps that happen manually every single time
- Reports pulled together by hand from multiple systems each month
Once an automation is built, it runs on Foundry 5’s managed infrastructure. Clients don’t touch servers or tools. Optional care plans keep everything monitored and maintained — with SLA-backed response times depending on the tier.
Why Now?
Until pretty recently, sophisticated workflow automation was an enterprise play. The tools were complex, the costs were high, and you needed a dedicated IT team to make it work. That’s changed significantly in the last few years. A new generation of automation platforms has made it possible to build reliable, powerful automations for a fraction of what it would have cost before.
Small businesses deserve access to the same operational leverage that larger companies have always had. That’s the window Foundry 5 is stepping through.
How the Two Businesses Connect
Five Towers Media and Foundry 5 are separate companies with separate teams, but the mission is the same: help small businesses grow and give them real support as they do.
The way I see it — marketing helps you grow your audience. Automation helps you build the operational foundation to actually handle that growth. One without the other leaves gaps. Together, they’re a much more complete picture of what it takes to run a business well at scale.
I’ll continue leading Five Towers Media. Foundry 5 has its own engineer and its own delivery model — so nothing changes about the work we do together here.
If You Know Someone Who Needs This…
If you work with a business that’s drowning in manual work — or if that business is yours — I’d love to have a conversation.
You can learn more at foundry5.us, or reach out to me directly at michael@fivetowers.us. No hard sell. Just a conversation about what’s actually slowing things down.
Foundry 5 is a Saratoga Springs business automation company that helps small businesses identify, scope, and automate the manual workflows slowing them down — things like invoicing, lead follow-up, client onboarding, and monthly reporting. Projects are fixed-scope and fixed-price, typically completed in two to three weeks.
Foundry 5 is based in Saratoga Springs, New York, and serves small businesses across the Capital Region.
Foundry 5 projects are fixed-price, ranging from $3,500 to $10,000 depending on complexity. Optional monthly care plans start at $350/month and cover ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and support.