Case studies and notes from the studio.
Two kinds of writing, in one feed. Case studies that show the shape of the work we do across operations, customer service, finance, logistics, and professional services. Plus shorter notes on how we think and the patterns we keep seeing. Updated as we publish.
Two days to complete eleven minutes of work
Time a process properly and the result is usually uncomfortable. Two days from start to finish, of which about eleven minutes is anybody actually doing anything.
Frequency, not difficulty, decides what to automate first
Asked what to automate first, most teams nominate the task they hate most. It is almost always the one that happens least often, and fixing it saves an afternoon a year.
The integration you need is probably already paid for
A gap appears between two systems and the instinct is to buy something to sit in the middle. More often the capability is already on the invoice, switched off and unopened.
The first hour of a Sprint is spent watching, not asking
Every business has a documented process and a real one. The gap between them is not sloppiness. It is where the workarounds live, and the workarounds are the actual requirements.
Most jobs are not lost on price
When a quote does not turn into a job, the story is usually that someone came in cheaper. Walk the timeline back and the job was often gone before price was ever the point.
Nobody reads the dashboard
Dashboards get built, admired for a fortnight, then quietly abandoned. That is a design problem, not a discipline problem. A number with no decision attached is decoration.
Every business has one person who cannot go on holiday
Ask what would break if one particular person were away for two weeks, and watch the pause. There is almost always a name, and that name is a risk nobody has priced.
The cheapest leads you have are the ones you are already ignoring
Most businesses have demand they are not collecting before they have demand they need to buy. Search, maps and referrals come first. Paid ads are the last lever, not the first.
The ads are not the problem, the machine behind them is
Turning on ads before the funnel behind them converts is the most common way businesses waste money. The funnel is the machine. Ads are just the moment you switch it on.
The spreadsheet that became a system when no one was looking
Almost every team has one workbook everyone is quietly afraid to touch. Here is how it got that way, and what to do about it.
Most automation projects fail before anyone writes code
When an automation project goes wrong, the tool usually gets the blame. The real cause is almost always something that happened earlier.
What we built when sales spent nine hours a week on lead routing
A 30-person SaaS sales team was losing nine hours a week to lead routing. Here is what the fix looked like in practice, and what we deliberately did not build.
Cutting the monthly close from eight days to two
A 28-person fintech was losing the first eight working days of every month to close. Three small connections later, the close runs in two days and around 120 hours a month come back across the team.
The list of automations is a roadmap, not a shopping basket
Most automation pitches arrive as a menu of pick-three options. We deliver them as a sequenced plan, ordered by where the hours actually come back.
Triaging 1,200 weekly tickets before an agent opens one
A 60-person SaaS team was getting 1,200 tickets a week, most of them in five buckets. A triage layer classifies, routes, and attaches the right macro. Real bugs surface to a human inside an hour, not five.
Three signs the boring bit of your day is fixable
A short diagnostic for people who suspect the boring layer of their day is fixable but cannot quite name what it is.
Stopping orders falling between Shopify and the warehouse
A 45-person homeware brand was pushing orders to its 3PL via twice-daily CSV exports. A webhook-driven feed replaced the CSVs and the oversells stopped.
Why we count the hours before we touch a tool
The most useful number in an automation project is not a price. It is the hours a task quietly eats every week.
Client onboarding in 20 minutes, not two hours of forms
An 18-person law firm was spending two hours of partner or paralegal time on every new matter. One form, one routing layer, and the partner signs a pre-populated letter while the rest is already done.
Syncing 4,000 SKUs across Shopify and Amazon every hour, not every Tuesday
A 12-person DTC pet brand ran its inventory sync as a weekly manual job. The hourly automatic sync took the manual loop away. Tuesday came back.
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