Example engagements
What a quieter business actually looks like.
Three typical engagements, told the way they happen: what we find at the desk, what we install, and where the business is ninety days later.
An honest note before you read: these are illustrative composites — built from the workflow patterns we see repeatedly and the results a typical build produces, not named clients. We'd rather show you a true picture with a label than a fake quote with a stock photo. Named case studies will replace these as our first client cohort completes.
Engineering services · 14 people · North East
The MD who stopped doing Sunday admin
The business
An owner-managed engineering services firm. The MD sells, quotes, manages the engineers and does the admin — which means the admin happens at night and on Sundays. Around 80 emails a day, half of which don't need him at all.
The week we found
Site visits produced voice notes that never became quotes until the weekend. Client meetings ended with actions in nobody's hands. Quotes took five days to go out — and two jobs a month were lost to faster competitors. Sunday night was inbox night, every week.
What we installed
- DAY: overnight inbox triage — needs-you / delegate / ignore, replies drafted in his voice
- DAY: meeting capture with tracked, chased actions
- SALES: quote first-drafts generated from his site-visit voice notes, in the house format
- A weekly commitments list — everything he promised anyone, in one place
Ninety days later
The inbox takes twenty minutes over coffee. Quotes go out within 24 hours of the site visit — he edits, he sends. Actions stopped evaporating because a system, not his memory, chases them. Sunday admin didn't get faster; it stopped existing.
≈9 hrs
a week back, mostly evenings
24 hrs
site visit → quote, down from 5 days
0
Sunday inbox sessions since week three
Wholesale & distribution · 30 people
The invoices that chased themselves
The business
A family wholesale business, second generation. Solid revenue, thin visibility: the numbers lived "in Xero somewhere", and what they meant took a weekend with spreadsheets to work out — so nobody worked it out.
The week we found
Overdue invoices were chased when someone remembered and felt brave — usually weeks late, because chasing regular customers felt awkward. Cash tightened every quiet month. Margin was drifting on two product lines and nobody could say why. The monthly "reporting" was a bank balance glance.
What we installed
- NUMBERS: a monthly management report in plain English — what changed, why, what to watch
- NUMBERS: automated, polite, escalating invoice chasing with a weekly who-owes-what summary
- NUMBERS: anomaly flags the day something moves oddly, not at year end
- DAY: the MD's inbox triage, because his week needed the room
Ninety days later
Debtor days fell by eleven — not through tougher chasing, but consistent chasing that no longer depended on anyone's nerve. The week-two anomaly flag caught a supplier price creep that had been quietly compounding for months. The MD reads one page a month and knows what to do next.
−11 days
average debtor days
Week 2
supplier price creep caught
1 page
monthly report that explains itself
Creative agency · 9 people
The founder who stopped being the manual
The business
A nine-person creative agency with a founder who was, functionally, the operating system: every process, every client preference, every "how do we do X" lived in her head. Talented team — permanently queued outside her door.
The week we found
She was answering the same questions she'd answered a hundred times. New starters took months to become useful. Proposals were written from scratch at night after client calls. The CRM was half fiction, so pipeline meetings ran on memory and optimism.
What we installed
- TEAM: a knowledge assistant trained on their own SOPs, past proposals and project history
- TEAM: weekly roll-ups — progress, blockers, who's stretched, who's stuck
- SALES: proposal first-drafts generated from the sales call, in the agency's voice
- SALES: CRM kept current automatically from email and call activity
Ninety days later
The team asks the assistant first and her second. Proposals go from call to reviewable draft the same afternoon. Pipeline meetings run on data. And in month three she did something she hadn't managed in three years: a full week off, with her phone on silent.
1 week
first full week off in 3 years
Same day
sales call → proposal draft
~70%
of "quick questions" now answered by the assistant
