Built in Effingham.
Here to stay.
Crossroads Automation is new. Swayde and Bryan aren't. Here's who we are, what we did before this, and why we started it.
How this started
We came at the same problem from two directions.
Swayde saw it from inside a large company. When an operation leaks time or money, it's rarely one big failure. It's a dozen small hand-offs nobody owns. Big companies have whole teams to find and fix those. Small businesses don't.
Bryan saw it as an owner. He's run his own online business for more than twenty years, and every problem along the way, from the servers to the books, landed on him because nobody else was going to fix it.
What we both saw: small and mid-sized businesses have the same problems big companies do, without anyone to help sort them out. Most owners have heard about AI. Almost none have the time to figure out what's real, what's worth paying for, and what's noise.
Our first project under this name started with a local restaurant owner and a callout problem. That became Workly: built, shipped, and used.
The industry doesn't matter. The approach does: find the leak, understand the business, pick the right fix.
Who you'd be working with
Crossroads Automation is owned and run by Swayde Sanders, a U.S. Army veteran. Bryan leads architecture and every technical build. One runs the project. One speaks code and the books. You'll talk to both of us the whole way, with no account managers and no hand-offs.
Swayde Sanders
Founder & Owner · Runs the project, start to finish
Swayde manages large automation and digital projects at Empower. He leads their digital transactions program, a portfolio of projects that has turned paper-based workflows into digital ones reaching millions of people. His projects land because the groundwork is right: the requirements are pinned down, the design fits how people actually work, it fixes the real problem, and it's simple enough to pick up fast. High adoption follows from that. His projects finish on time and on budget, with any changes agreed up front.
Before that, he was a U.S. Army Sergeant with combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, earning two campaign stars. He trained and led anywhere from eight to forty soldiers at a time, and was responsible for $6M in classified equipment that he moved from Louisiana to Kuwait to Iraq to Afghanistan and back. Zero losses. He finished at the top of his Basic Leadership Course class of more than 100 soldiers. It's where he learned to deliver when the pressure is highest and people are counting on you.
He started Crossroads because he got tired of watching big companies get bigger while the businesses in his own community got left behind. Effingham deserves a partner who actually shows up. His calling is simple: take the skills God gave him and use them to help the people around him.
Bryan Sanders
Lead Engineer · Speaks code and the books
Bryan is a full-stack engineer who has been building systems real businesses depend on for over twenty years. Not demos. He architects the whole thing himself: the servers, the codebase and the solution design. In 2003 he founded allaboutpocketknives.com, a marketplace and collector community that's still running today on servers he maintains himself. Years before it was common, he was working directly with eBay to sync inventory between systems in real time, an approach that became the modern drop-ship model. He's also built e-commerce platforms, real estate software pulling live listings, and investment analysis tools.
He's been reading numbers since he was a kid studying baseball card stats. He earned his finance degree from Eastern Illinois while working full-time, and when a spinal cord injury hit in his final semester, he finished remotely during rehab, added advanced accounting, and kept a 3.8.
After years building for himself and others, he stepped back to run his business. Then AI changed the landscape and pulled him back in, not as a newcomer chasing hype, but as an engineer who knows where it speeds things up and where it adds risk.
What you can hold us to.
- We're picky, on purpose
We take on a few projects at a time, and only ones we're confident we can fix. If we're not the fit, we'll tell you who is.
- Built with you
We learn how your business runs before we recommend anything, and you're involved throughout, not handed something at the end.
- People stay in charge
Automation handles the repetitive stuff. Your people keep the judgment calls and the relationships. We're freeing your team, not replacing it.
- You own it
Custom work is yours, and it keeps running if we part ways. Workly is our product on a monthly plan, and we'll say so up front.
- We're here
We're not trying to be in 50 states. We're focused on Effingham and Central Illinois. When you call, you get us.
The name has a few layers.
It's where we live. Effingham sits where I-57 meets I-70, the crossroads of Central Illinois. That cross you see lit up at night off the interstate? That's home.
It's where a lot of businesses are: at a fork in the road. Keep running things by hand and slowly fall behind, or use the tools that already exist and stop losing ground.
And it's personal. Swayde is a Christian, and his faith guides everything he does: how he works, how he treats people, and how he tries to serve this community. It shows up in the work, in integrity, in keeping our word, and in caring about something beyond profit. It's a big part of why we care about doing this right.
We're early, and honest about it.
We're building a business that helps local companies get to the cutting edge, starting with the ones we can sit across the table from. AI has changed the game in just the last few years, and plenty of good businesses are still running on tools and workflows from decades ago. That's not a knock on anyone. But the game has changed, and the businesses that change with it are the ones that will still be here in ten years. We want our neighbors to be among them.
The first thing we shipped, Workly, is live and looking for its next partner. The businesses we work with now will shape what this becomes, and in return they get our full attention and direct access to both of us.
When local businesses do well, everyone here benefits. That's the reason we started this.
Want to talk?
Tell us what's going on in your business. We'll tell you honestly whether we can help.