How does a distributor built on spreadsheets and one person's memory move to a single operating core?

Business: B2B industrial supplies distributor, Cape Town, South Africa

Size: 13 staff

Primary service: Operational Control and Visibility

Secondary services: Workflow Redesign and Automation, Cash Flow Recovery

Engagement mode: Design and Implement

Status: In Flight

A B2B industrial supplies distributor in South Africa had grown on spreadsheets, several disconnected systems, and one person's judgement. GrowthPains is installing a single operating core so quotes, customers, inventory and pricing sit in one place, and the owner is no longer the only route through a decision.

What was the problem?

The founder put the starting point plainly: quoting, sales, and delivery. What was in the way:

• Quotes took too long, with no quick way to see what a customer had ordered before, and repeat orders ran the same slow manual route as new ones.

• The accounting system could only hold one price list, so complex customer pricing was a workaround and transport was recalculated by hand on nearly every quote.

• Online shopping invoices were manually rekeyed in the accounting system.

• Sales leads arriving across channels were hard to capture and then track to a sale, and there was no way to revive old customers.

• The pricing decisions that mattered all sat with the founder. Two weeks away and quoting, banking, and marketing stalled.

• No written procedures, and more than ten spreadsheets plugging gaps, each going stale.

What did we find?

• Enquiries from five sources had nowhere central to land, so leads slipped and no one could see the end-to-end pipeline.

• Customer records were created in several systems at once, with no authoritative version to trust.

• Credit status and past pricing were invisible at the moment a quote was being prepared.

• Nearly every decision depended on the owner, the single largest constraint on the business growing.

What did we do?

• Documented the sales processes with a named owner agreed for each, and retired a redundant software subscription, saving money each month that would have grown more costly as the business grows.

• Installed one operating core system to replace the scattered tools and spreadsheets, keeping the accounting system as the financial ledger and the online store as the storefront.

• Stood up a single sales pipeline that captures every enquiry and tracks it from first contact to paid, with one customer record consolidated from the separate systems: 772 customers and 2,757 leads.

• Built a clear pricing structure by customer type, with credit status visible at the point of quoting.

What is in place so far?

The engagement is in delivery, so revenue results and all outcomes are not in yet. Already live: the team works one pipeline they were trained on by us, one customer record replaces the scattered copies, and a prioritised list of 30 findings (6 of them critical) is agreed and being worked through.

This case study is anonymised. If you would like to hear more about the business behind it, get in touch.

Not sure where to start?

Take our free Operational Health Check. It takes five minutes and shows you where to focus first. If you already know what needs fixing, book a call.

How do you read a 17-year-old print and install business built on its people?

Business: Large-format commercial print and install

Location: England, United Kingdom

Size: 13 staff, 17 years trading

Primary service: Operational Control and Visibility

Secondary service: Workflow Redesign and Automation

Engagement mode: Review and Assess

Status: Scoping

A large-format commercial print and install business, with 13 staff and 17 years trading, brought GrowthPains in to assess what was slowing the operation and to prioritise what needed attention first. This is what the assessment surfaced, and how it is being taken forward.

What was the problem?

A business like this grows for years on the strength of its people and its craft. The work is good and the clients are serious. What the team feels day to day is that everything takes more chasing than it should. Nobody can see where each job sits, quoting starts close to scratch every time, and the people out on site or working from home are cut off from the rest of the business.

What did we find?

• No single source of truth for client information, job history, or pricing. Account history is fragmented and repeat orders are slower than they should be.

• No clean view of the pipeline, from lead to quoted, won, in production, installed, invoiced, and paid. It lives across too many places to see at a glance.

• The document tools and the accounting system do not talk to each other, so the same details get keyed in more than once.

• Quotes and job bags are manual templates. Each job starts near enough from zero, and versions get confused.

• Communication is scattered across email, messaging, and in person. Install activity in particular is invisible to the rest of the business.

• Underneath all of it, one gap: tools were added over the years to replace paper, filing, and billing, never as a joined-up way of working. When a key person is out, activity stalls.

What did we do?

• Ran a first-pass operational assessment with a cross-section of the team, read against their own internal sales guide.

• Traced how work moves from enquiry to paid, and named where it stalls, duplicates, or depends on one person's memory.

• Identified the core gap as an operating model that never kept pace with the business, rather than a people or tools problem.

• Set the sequence for going wider before any work is proposed: time with the founders, the full span from studio to production to install to finance, and how data moves between the systems.

What is in place so far?

The leadership team has a clear, honest read of where the operation loses time and visibility, and why. The assessment was deliberately scoped as a first view, enough to see the shape, not to prescribe. The agreed next step is to widen it before proposing work, so the priority list is sequenced by impact and nothing gets rebuilt until the team has agreed what good looks like.

This case study is anonymised. If you would like to hear more about the business behind it, get in touch.

Not sure where to start?

Take our free Operational Health Check. It takes five minutes and shows you where to focus first. If you already know what needs fixing, book a call.