Two engagements, start to handover.
Each file follows the same path: what was happening, what we found, what was designed, and what the business was left running.
Illustrative engagement scenarios showing the shape of the work — not named client claims, not measured results, not a guarantee of future outcomes.
Reducing founder dependency in a growing professional-services business
The firm had grown past the point where one person could see everything, but the habits had not changed. Quotes, hires, refunds and supplier spend all waited for the owner. Work paused whenever they were with a client.
Listing a fortnight of approvals showed most were routine and repeated. Nobody below the owner had a written mandate to settle them, so asking was the safe option. Two function leads believed they shared the same outcome.
One accountable lead per function, each with a written spend and scope cap. Anything inside the cap is theirs; anything outside goes to a weekly forum rather than an interruption. The owner keeps direction, capital and senior hires.
Routine approvals are settled by the function lead on the day and reviewed together once a week. The owner's day stops being interrupted by decisions that were never theirs to make, and the forum leaves a written record of what was agreed.
Describes the shape of the change. No measured figures are claimed.
Installing purchasing and inventory control in a multi-SKU product business
Reordering happened when someone noticed a gap on the shelf. Purchase decisions were split across three people with no shared view, so the same range could be simultaneously overstocked and out of stock.
The data existed but was never brought together: sales history in one system, supplier lead times in inboxes, stock counts on a spreadsheet updated when there was time. No one owned the reorder decision for a given range.
Products grouped into a small number of classes by movement and criticality, each with a stated reorder point and cover target. One named buyer per class. A weekly purchasing review that reads from a single stock-and-commitment view rather than from memory.
Purchasing becomes a scheduled decision against a rule rather than a reaction to an empty shelf. Exceptions — a class breaching its cover target, a supplier slipping — surface in the weekly review while there is still time to act on them.
Describes the shape of the change. No measured figures are claimed.
If either note reads like your own business, tell us where the work is getting stuck — start a conversation, or look at the three tracks these came from.