Work we can talk about

Clients are described by industry rather than by name, at their request. The situations, decisions, and numbers are real to the work even where the details are disguised.

Two consultants reviewing figures together at a desk

Regional Retail Chain

Reworking store operations from the stockroom up

A retail store interior with staff arranging merchandise on open shelves

The challenge

A fourteen-store chain with strong same-town loyalty was quietly losing margin to its own fulfillment process. Online orders were picked from sales-floor stock, so shelves looked bare by mid-afternoon even though the back room was full. Store managers compensated by working six-day weeks, and turnover in the stockroom roles had reached twice the regional average.

The approach

We spent the first two weeks in stores rather than in the office, mapping every step from truck arrival to shelf to order pickup. The diagnosis was unglamorous: no one owned the boundary between replenishment and order staging, so both jobs were done twice and neither well. We redesigned the workflow so that replenishment was completed before doors opened, gave online picking its own staging area in the back room, and set a short daily review that managers could run in eight minutes.

The result

Within one season, fulfillment delays fell from same-day-backlog to a four-hour standard, stockroom turnover dropped by half, and the operating changes held without consultant supervision. The efficiency gain across the chain averaged:

30%

average efficiency increase across the chain within one season

B2B SaaS Startup

Trimming overhead before the next raise

A software team's office with monitors showing analytics dashboards

The challenge

A forty-person software company had grown headcount 60 percent in eighteen months, and its costs had grown faster than revenue. With a fundraise twelve months out, the founders needed to show operating discipline without stalling the product roadmap that justified the raise. Earlier cost-cutting attempts had produced a round of laptop-policy emails and little else.

The approach

We started from spend rather than headcount, because the books showed the company paying twice for the same capabilities in different departments. Consolidating overlapping software licenses, renegotiating the two largest vendor contracts, and moving one non-critical workstream to a scheduled batch process removed a meaningful share of annual overhead. Not one engineer changed what they worked on.

The result

Each change was approved in a single leadership meeting because every line arrived with its own dollar figure. The company entered its raise with a materially different cost base:

18%

reduction in annual overhead, with no change to the product roadmap

Regional Healthcare Provider

Rebuilding the patient acquisition funnel

A healthcare professional in conversation at a clinic reception area

The challenge

A provider group with six clinics was spending more on marketing each year while new-patient volume stayed flat. Referrals still came mostly from a handful of long-standing physician relationships, and no one could say which advertising channels actually produced booked appointments. Meanwhile two newer clinics were running at half capacity.

The approach

We traced the journey from first ad impression to kept appointment, interviewing new patients about where they had heard of the group and what almost stopped them from calling. The finding was simple: the group's best channel was invisible in its own reporting, while the largest line item went to a directory that produced almost nothing. We reallocated budget toward search and the referral program, rewrote the intake call script around the two concerns patients raised most, and set up weekly reporting the office managers could maintain themselves.

The result

Qualified new-patient inquiries rose steadily for six months without any increase in total marketing spend:

42%

increase in qualified leads within 6 months, at flat marketing spend

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