Ways to work with me
Most people start with a review, because the right fix is hard to spot from the inside, and nothing beyond it is assumed. Everything is quoted as a fixed fee once we both know what is involved, so there are no surprises later.
Operations review
This is where most people start, usually because something is clearly not right but it is hard to say what from the inside. It is worth doing when too much depends on a handful of people, when margin is slipping without an obvious cause, or when you are about to take on more work and want to know what will break first.
How long it takes depends on the size of the business and how much is going on, so I scope it with you before either of us commits to anything. What it involves is the same either way: sitting with the people doing the work rather than only the people managing it, following a job from the first enquiry through to the invoice, and going over the numbers you already keep. No useless questionnaires, and no workshops unless they genuinely earn their place.
What you get at the end is a proper piece of work rather than a top line summary, written plainly enough to hand to your team and honest about what is worth doing and what is not: where the time and money are going, what to deal with first, and what it would take to deal with it.
Systems and process build
Sometimes the diagnosis is not the problem. You know exactly what is broken, you have known for months, and nobody has had a clear week to go and rebuild it while the business carries on around them.
We agree what good looks like, then I design the process, build it, and test it with the people who will actually be using it, because a process that works only when I am in the room is not worth having. It might be quoting, scheduling, onboarding, reporting, or the handover between two teams that have never quite agreed on who does what. If software is involved, it is configured and running before I leave, and your team has been trained on it rather than sent a document about it. Where nothing off the shelf fits, I can build what you need myself.
Fractional operations support
For businesses that have outgrown the founder doing operations in the evenings but are some way from justifying an operations director on the payroll.
I take a day or two a month, starting with a standing monthly session where we go through how the business is running, keep the improvements moving rather than letting them slide behind the urgent work, and I am on the end of the phone in between for the decisions that would otherwise sit on your desk for a fortnight. It tends to work better than a project, because the awkward things get chipped away at steadily instead of building up into another piece of work.
ISO readiness
Usually this starts with a client, a tender or an insurer asking whether you hold 9001 or 27001, often with a deadline attached. I can work to that deadline, but the better position is to be ready before anybody asks, so certification is a decision you make rather than a scramble somebody else forces on you.
I am a qualified auditor, so I know what will actually be asked for on the day, and a great deal of ISO preparation goes on things no auditor will ever look at. I run a gap assessment against the standard, write the documentation around the way you already work instead of inventing a parallel system nobody follows, and then run the internal audit myself before the real one. The aim is a management system your team recognises as a description of their own jobs.
Automation and practical AI
Most admin exists because software could not do something a person could. That gap has narrowed a great deal in the last couple of years, and a fair amount of what a team types out by hand can now be handled properly and safely without adding anyone to the payroll.
I build these myself rather than handing you a list of products and leaving you to it. Where something off the shelf does the job, I will say so and set it up properly, and where nothing quite fits I build a custom solution around how your business actually works, then run it alongside your team until it is doing what it should. Recent work includes:
Work that comes in
Handled end to end, from the first enquiry through to the quote, without waiting on somebody to find the time.
Decisions made daily
Can we cover it, do we have the capacity, what should it cost. The questions your team fields all day, answered in seconds and answered the same way every time.
Records and compliance
Evidence captured as the work happens, rather than gathered up afterwards.
Pace: email enquiries answered within minutes
Enquiry handling of this kind is available as a managed service. Pace replies in your tone, asks for missing details and sends quotations from your own prices.
None of it is automation for its own sake. Each one replaced something being done by hand, taking hours the business could not spare.
Not sure which one you need?
Most people are not, at first. Half an hour on the phone usually settles it.