Case Studies
Our Work with Growing Businesses
What the owner was dealing with. What our observations found underneath it. What has been put in place.
Engagements span cash flow recovery, operational control and visibility, workflow redesign and automation, AI and data implementations, and operational support.
If you would like to hear more about the business behind any of these, get in touch.
Bringing operational control to goods receiving at a meat wholesaler
A wholesale meat business in Johannesburg brought us in to tighten operational control over goods receiving. The process is now fully documented, the control gaps identified, and an optimised design ready to put in place.
Business: Wholesale meat merchant
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa
Size: Part of an owner-led group spanning indoor golf, restaurant, coffee shop, deli, 3 butcheries, and wholesale
Primary service: Operational Control and Visibility
Secondary service: Cash Flow Recovery
Engagement mode: Review and Assess
Status: Handed Over (Phase 1)
A wholesale meat business in Johannesburg brought us in to tighten operational control over goods receiving. The process is now fully documented, the control gaps identified, and an optimised design is ready to put in place.
What was the problem?
The business was growing, but too much of how it ran lived in a few people's heads. The owner wanted the operation tightened and made to stick, starting at the point where stock comes in the door, because that is where money quietly leaks. Receiving worked, but nobody could say with confidence that every delivery was received, recorded, and paid for correctly.
What did we find?
One person both owned and signed off receiving, so there was no independent check on changes or escalations. Growing key-person dependency.
Short-delivery credit notes and price checks lived on paper and WhatsApp, not in the system of record, so nothing reliably linked what was owed back to what was received.
Nothing recorded what was ordered, and at what agreed price, before a delivery arrived, so the team could only ever check part of the picture.
The same received-against-invoice check was repeated by up to three people, tying up management time while no one clearly owned the control.
What did we do?
Documented and mapped the whole receiving process end to end, exactly as it runs, replacing knowledge held in individuals.
Ran a structured operational review across process, workflow, systems, finance, and control, and pinned down the root causes above.
Designed the improved version with a single clear owner, a separate senior sponsor, defined measures, and a handoff that no longer stalls on one person.
What is in place so far?
The leadership team now has one shared, documented view of how receiving runs and where the control gaps sit, plus an optimised design ready to walk through and implement. This is the first process in a phased plan to bring the same operational control and performance visibility across the wider operation.
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?
A large-format commercial print and install business, with 13 staff and 17 years trading, brought us 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.
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 in progress
A large-format commercial print and install business, with 13 staff and 17 years trading, brought us 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 solid. 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 sales and operational tools and the accounting system do not talk to each other, so the same details get keyed in more than once.
Quotes and job cards are manual templates. Each job starts near enough from zero, and design versions get confused as it moves through production.
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 of the task at hand. The agreed next step is to widen our assessment for a deeper view of each staff member’s daily work before proposing a plan, 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.