No deck, no questionnaire. One call with the people who would do the work.
Our specialties
01 · Where the hours go
Nobody is short of
good people. They are
short of the hours
those people were
hired for.
Retyping
The same information moved by hand between two systems that were never made to talk.
Rebuilding
The deliverable made from scratch every time, because nobody had a quiet week to turn it into a repeatable thing.
Searching
Hunting for what the company already knows, in drives, threads, and the head of the one person who was there.
Chasing
Requests, reminders, and reminders about reminders, sent by someone paid to do something else.
Reporting
Proving the value you already delivered, which is necessary and moves nothing forward.
the work you hired them forthe work you did not
48% of a 40 hour week, on work that never needed them. Move the slider to your own honest number.
The slider starts where McKinsey found it: surveyed middle managers spend nearly half of every working week on nonmanagerial work, with close to a full day going to administration alone. Your estimate, not our promise. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the hours we find go back to the people who were losing them.
Emily Field, Bryan Hancock, Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi and Bill Schaninger, “Stop wasting your most precious resource: Middle managers”, McKinsey & Company, 10 March 2023. The survey reports ranges rather than point figures, so we start the slider at nearly half and let you correct it.
02 · Carrying more than the team can carry
You are carrying more
than the team can
carry. Every season
proves it.
It never wins against whatever is on fire this week, and it gets heavier every quarter you grow.
It has a price
And nobody has ever worked it out
Hours a week, times what that person costs you, times the year. A real number, not a feeling.
It spreads
Into teams that never caused it
Everyone waiting on that person waits too, so the delay lands somewhere else and gets blamed on somebody else.
It grows with you
You are punished for doing well
Every bit of effort you put into growing the company makes the problem you already have bigger.
03 · The fixes you already know
So you hire. And it
costs more than the
hours did.
A firm running on those numbers is carrying more clients than the team can carry, and hiring is the fix everyone reaches for first.
You do not know who you are getting.
Three to six months to find someone good, if there is anyone to find. Fewer people get licensed every year.
They land on the same work.
The new hire absorbs the overflow. Two people now do the work that never needed one.
When they leave, it leaves with them.
Whatever they learned about your clients and your process walks out. You start the search, and the training, again.
A new hire buys room, not a fix.
The other two answers cost differently. Somebody is already pasting documents into a chat window and doing the last twenty percent by hand, which is not an AI problem but the process underneath it.
A software house builds what you tell them to. Tell them to automate a broken process and they will automate it beautifully.
For two hundred thousand dollars.
A consultant hands you a strategy deck. Six months later the deck is in a drawer.
Nothing was implemented.
04 · Who you would be working with
You get the thinking a
consultant would sell you
and the build a software
house would charge you
for, in one six-week
engagement.
Raffaele D’Apolito and Simone Cino, Lean Six Sigma Black Belts. We spent years inside operations before any of this was possible, which is why we start by watching how the work is really done rather than how the org chart says it is. You will not be handed to a junior: the people who map your processes are the people who build the system.
If you have a headache three times a week you can take a pill every time, or you can find out it is the chair. We find the chair.
05 · How it works
Six weeks. One critical
process. Chosen
together.
Week 1
We sit with the person who runs the process and write down what their week actually contains, until the wasted hours are visible and counted.
Screen by screenYour team, not only leadership
Weeks 2 to 5
We build it and put it live inside the tools you already pay for, while they watch, so nothing arrives as a black box.
Nothing new to buyYou steer
Week 6
Hand over. We stay long enough for them to break it, fix it and change it without us. What we build stays in the process, not in someone’s head: when people change, it keeps running.
DocumentedOwned by you
Fixed scope, fixed price, and 3 weeks of free support after every build. The price is set against what the process is costing you, not against a rate card: we count the hours with you first, then agree a fixed price in writing before anything starts. This is not a discount: it is us taking on the risk instead of you. Every build includes three weeks of support after handover, written into the contract: if the process is not running by the end date, those three weeks are ours to finish it at no cost.
The six weeks stand on their own. If you stop there you keep what we built. Where it leads, when it works, is a standing arrangement across more of the company, and that is a second conversation at a bigger number.
• · The turn
The same team. The
output of one three
times the size.
Every firm we have worked with kept its people and did more of the work it is paid for. Nobody worked later.
70%average time reduction on the process we take on
2 to 3×the work carried by the same team
6 weeksfrom the first session to something in use
Across the engagements we have run. Client names withheld, the numbers and the quotes are theirs.
One more hire, or the hours
you already pay for.
Both routes buy capacity. They cost different things, and only one of them removes the work.
Option A · Hire another one
Add a person to absorb the overflow.
Three to six months to find someone good, if you find them
Salary, payroll taxes, equipment, holiday, management time
Three more months before they are useful without supervision
The work that never needed a qualified person is still there, now shared by two
Works. Slowly, and only while they stay.
Option B · Grow without the hire
Remove the work that was never worth their rate.
Six weeks to something your team is using
No payroll, no desk, no search, no notice period
The work does not move to someone cheaper. It stops being done by anyone
The hours return to the people who were losing them
And the next person you do hire starts on a process that works.
06 · What changed, in their numbers
Three firms, three bottlenecks, same method.
Recruiting · staffing agency, 50+ people
Recruiters were spending more time documenting interviews than running them.
The same information was written three times, in three formats. We fixed the flow first, then built the thing that captures the interview once and shapes it for every destination.
15 to 20 hrs → 4 to 6admin per week
45 to 60 min → 10 to 15per client report
4 to 5 → 6 to 8real conversations a day
50+ people11 to 14 hrs returned a week+40% conversations a day
My recruiters got their evenings back.Operations Director
Professional services · B2B technical firm, 100+ people
Every proposal took sixty to seventy five hours, and most of it was archaeology.
Five hundred past proposals with no way to search them. Now the incoming RFP is read, the relevant history surfaces, and the draft arrives most of the way done. The team spends its time on the part clients pay for.
60 to 75 hrs → 17 to 22per proposal
30 to 35 → 50 to 105proposals a year
15 to 20 hrs → 2 to 3finding past work
100+ people3x the proposalssame four person team
Same team, exponential capacity increase.VP Operations
Consulting · multi-practice firm, 25 to 75 people
Consultants lost fifteen to twenty hours a week re-discovering what the firm already knew.
Decades of project history sat in shared drives, email threads and the memory of whoever was still there. Now a question in plain English returns the answer with its sources.
15 to 20 hrs → ~30 mina week searching
12 to 20 hrs → 2 to 4proposal research
toward 75 to 80%utilization
25 to 75 people~19 hrs returned a weekutilization toward 80%
We stopped re-discovering what we already know.Practice Leader
Clients are anonymous to protect their competitive advantage. On the call we will put you in touch with one of them.
07 · Book it
Which process, given
six weeks and
someone to own it,
would change the most
for you?
If you do not know, it is the one your best person is doing by hand right now. Thirty minutes and you will know.
You talk, we map. One process that hurts: where it stalls, who touches it, what happens when it slips.
One page back within two working days. Where we think the hours are and what we would take first.
It is yours either way, whether or not anything follows.
Pick a slot that survives your week.
Book a 30-minute callCalls run 30 minutes and are held by the people who would do the work.
Five reasons not to call
You want to cut headcount. Our clients buy hours back so they do not have to.
You want a product recommendation. A reseller will serve you faster.
Nobody owns the decision. Then the call is pleasant and nothing follows it.
You want a strategy document. We build and we stay.
The process is not costing you multiples of what fixing it would. We work that out together, and if the gap is thin we say so.
We also build ventures from scratch in sectors where no solution exists at all, with domain experts who know them from the inside. That is a different conversation: .
