Digital and AI transformation

You can't get a straight answer out of your own business.

We work out what your systems should look like, recommend what to buy, and map out how to get there.
You get a costed recommendation and an implementation plan. Whether we then help build it is a separate decision, scoped once you have seen the plan.
Done properly this is how a business scales without the headcount. Including a straight view on where AI actually helps, and the much longer list of places it doesn't.

Book a conversation Score your business

who it's for

Businesses that have outgrown their spreadsheets.

The signal is how long it takes to answer a simple question. Margin by job. Who owes you what. How many hours went into that project. If the answer is always to ask a particular person, that is the problem. Most of our clients turn over between $2 million and $10 million.

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Building and construction

Builders running jobs across spreadsheets, email and a whiteboard, with finance sitting in a system that never sees the job.

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Professional services

Firms where time, billing and client data live in three places, and the monthly report is rebuilt by hand.

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Local manufacturing

Manufacturers where compliance records, production and orders sit in separate systems and nobody sees the full picture. Most of our experience here is in food manufacturing and the services around it.

what we do

We start with the strategy and the plan.

Every engagement begins the same way: audit what you run on, work out what you actually need, and write the plan for getting there. What happens next is your call. Your own team or your chosen vendor can build it, or we can scope the build separately once the plan exists and you have decided it is worth doing.

Find the constraint

We work through how a live job actually moves, rather than how the org chart says it does. Most owners have never seen it laid out in one place, and it is rarely where they expected.

Design how delivery should work

The workflow, the handovers, the standard at each stage, and who is allowed to decide what without checking. Built around your business rather than lifted off a shelf.

Size what you can carry

A way to answer whether you can take the next job on numbers instead of instinct, and a clear view of where the ceiling actually sits today.

Write the implementation plan

What changes, in what order, over what period, sequenced so the business keeps running while it happens. Then you decide who builds it: your own team, or us on a separately scoped engagement.

Size what you can carry

A way to answer whether you can take the next job on numbers instead of instinct, and a clear view of where the ceiling actually sits today.

sound familiar

Scaling delivery without the headcount, and what gets in the way.

These are the things owners say when they call. If two or three of them land, you are in the right place.

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Every quote still comes past me.

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Jobs run over and nobody sees it until the end.

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I'm still the one doing the scheduling.

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We do variations and forget to charge them.

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Only one person knows how that job runs.

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We took on more work and the margin didn't follow.

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Firefighting is just normal now.

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I can't take two weeks off.

Frequently asked questions

Common questions

How do I grow my business without hiring more staff?

Look at how work moves before you look at headcount. In most owner-led businesses the ceiling is the process, not the people. The usual culprits are an undocumented delivery process, no capacity model, scheduling held in the owner's head, and decisions that all route back to one person. Fixing those typically frees more capacity than a hire would, and costs less. If you genuinely are short of people, at least you will be hiring into a system rather than into the chaos.

Do you build it, or just write the plan?

The starting point is always the strategy and the implementation plan, because until that exists nobody can price the build sensibly, including us. Once it exists you have real options: hand it to your own team, put it out to someone else, or ask us to scope the build. Plenty of clients do the first. It is a separate decision, made with a costed plan in front of you rather than a vague commitment at the outset.

Is this just implementing project management software?

No, though software often comes into it. A new system laid over a broken process reproduces the broken process faster and more expensively. We work out how the job should move first, then pick the tool. If the tooling really is the main problem, the digital and AI transformation page is the better starting point.

Is this the same as hiring a part-time COO?

It overlaps, and plenty of people find this page searching that term. A part-time COO sits in your business and runs it for a set number of days a month, indefinitely. We start with a defined piece of work: what should change, how it should run instead, and a plan for putting it in place. If you want us to help build it after that, we scope it separately. You are never committing to an open-ended arrangement at the outset.

What do we end up with?

A map of how work moves with the constraint points marked, a written process design for how it should run instead, a capacity model you can use before quoting, a resourcing view specified and ready to build, decision rights and approval limits set out, the measures and meeting rhythm defined, and a costed implementation plan saying what changes in what order and who owns each part. That plan is yours whether or not you do anything further with us.

How long does it take and what does it cost?

The self-assessment and the first conversation are free. The strategy and implementation plan usually take six to ten weeks depending on the size of the business, and that is a fixed scope with a fixed price. Building it takes longer, and whether we do any of that is a separate decision made once the plan exists. Nothing is open-ended and nothing is quoted by the hour.

Will my team just work around whatever we put in?

Some will try, usually for a fair reason. The most common cause is that the new way made someone's job harder and nobody asked them first. We design with the people who do the work rather than around them, and the delivery plan builds in a review once it has been running a month, so the workarounds get found.

Book a conversation

Bring us one job that went sideways.

Half an hour, no charge, no pitch. We will work backwards from a real job and tell you where it actually came unstuck. Most owners find that more useful than any proposal.

Book a conversation