The Assessment
How it works
A fixed-price process. Two paid calls, about ten days apart, after a free 20-minute call to check the fit. The written report follows.
£2,500 + VAT
Refunded if the numbers don't hold
3 workflows
Plus two staff interviews
~3 hours
Total demand on your business
8 sections
In the written report
The work
What I actually do
Most AI advice tells you which opportunities exist. That is the easy half, and within two years you will get it free from a chat window.
The hard half is knowing which ones survive contact with a real organisation — which change actually holds once it meets your approval process, your legacy system and the person who quietly keeps using the spreadsheet. 30 years of software delivery is 30 years of watching initiatives die at week three. That is what you are paying for.
I don't need access to your systems.
No customer records, no finance systems, no mailboxes, no logins. The assessment is built from conversations and from watching how work moves, not from your data. If you want me to look at something, you show me. Nothing is connected and nothing is exported.
What's in scope
- Workflows
- Up to three recurring workflows
- Interviews
- you for an hour, plus two of your people for 30 minutes each
- Coverage
- One legal entity, one primary site
- Your time
- about three hours in total, across the whole business
- Elapsed
- around ten days from payment to review call
- Rates used
- your own fully-loaded rates, or an agreed proxy — the report states which
- You get
- a written report, a 60-minute review call and a 30-day plan
- Not included
- implementation, licences, IT or security remediation
- Larger scope needed if
- more than three workflows, multiple sites, multiple entities or regulated data in scope
Three hours of your business's time
The free 20-minute call. An hour with you. Half an hour each with two of the people who actually do the work. A half-hour review call at the end. About three hours in total, and that is the whole demand on your business.
The two staff interviews are the reason this works. An hour with the owner tells me how you believe the work flows. Where that differs from how it actually flows is usually where the money is, and you cannot find it by asking one person.
The process
What happens, in order
- 1.A free 20-minute call to check this is a fit. If it isn't, I say so.
- 2.Payment in full. This books both calls, about ten days apart.
- 3.A short intake form — headcount, systems, who does what.
- 4.An hour with you. Half an hour each with two of your people.
- 5.Analysis.
- 6.A one-page brief, 48 hours before the review call, with the numbers for you to sign off.
- 7.The report and a 60-minute call to go through it.
- 8.A 30-day plan and priced options if you want help doing it.
Ten days, not five
Other people do this in a week. The extra time is the validation window — you get the numbers to check before I write anything on top of them. The figures the report rests on are yours, not mine.
The report
What the written report contains
- 01Where the business is nowdescribed in your own words, not mine.
- 02The workflows examinedwhat happens today, step by step, including the parts nobody has written down.
- 03What is worth changingranked on impact and effort.
- 04What each change costssetup effort, running cost, and the projected saving against your signed-off figures.
- 05What not to doand the reason why, for each one.
- 06Where your data would godestination, training position and DPA status for every tool considered.
- 07The first 30 daysa plan for the highest-ranked change, with a checkpoint at week three.
- 08What help would costpriced options, if you want them.
Eight sections. The length depends on what I find in your business, not on a page target.
The report is yours
Take it to your MSP, your accountant, another consultant, or your own team. Nothing in it is written to make you dependent on me, and none of the recommendations require me to implement them. I would rather you acted on it without me than filed it and did nothing.
Guarantee
£2,500 + VAT. Refunded in full if the numbers do not hold.
Before I write the report, you sign off the figures it rests on — your volumes, your hours, your rates. If those signed figures cannot support at least five hours a week worth fixing, you get the fee back.
Your numbers, in writing, before anything is built on them. That is the part that matters: it means neither you nor I has to argue about whether a saving is real.
- Whose hours: named roles, not "the business"
- Baseline: your stated volumes, signed off before the report is built
- Rate: your fully-loaded cost, or an agreed proxy — the report states which
- Netting: implementation effort is deducted from payback
- Excluded: your own drafting time and anything you decline to have investigated
Fee credit
Half the fee comes back if you build.
£1,250 off any fixed-price implementation of £5,000 or more, commissioned within 60 days of the review call. One implementation, not spread across several.
After the report
What comes after
If you want help implementing, that is fixed-price work, scoped from the report, from £4,000. A single workflow is usually £4,000 to £5,000; more involved builds go up to around £8,000.
Ongoing monthly support starts at £900 a month. What it covers depends on how much of the running you want to hand over — a monthly review and priority access at the lower end, active management of live workflows at the upper. The figure is set at proposal stage, against what you actually want covered.
Method
Map how work flows. Make it visible. Find where it stalls. Fix the biggest stall first.
That has been the approach for 30 years. The tools change. Right now, AI is the most interesting tool for fixing the stall — but it is not the point, and in five years it won't be the interesting part.
The report focuses on the stall, not the tool. What to use follows from that, not the other way around.
Do I use AI to write your report?
In the analysis, yes — pattern-matching across what I heard, cross-checking the interviews against each other, making sure I have not missed something obvious. Not to decide what to recommend, and not to produce the figures. Every number in the report is one I have worked out and checked myself.
The FAQ
The awkward questions
The ones worth asking before you spend £2,500.
- What if you don't find anything worth doing?
- You get the fee back. Before I write the report you sign off the figures it rests on — your volumes, your hours, your rates. If those signed figures cannot support at least five hours a week worth fixing, I refund it in full. You have 30 days from the review call to claim, in writing. That is the whole reason the sign-off exists: neither of us ends up arguing about whether a saving was real.
- Who actually does the work?
- Me. There is no team, no subcontractors, and no junior sent to do the interviews. That is a deliberate limit on the size of this business rather than something to apologise for — I take four to eight clients a year, which is exactly why the price can be fixed and the scope bounded. If a specialist is ever needed for something, I'll ask you before bringing anyone in.
- Do I have to use you to implement it?
- No, and the report is written on the assumption that you might not. Every recommendation names what to do, roughly what it costs, and who could do it — your own team, your existing IT company, or someone else entirely. If you do want my help, that is fixed-price work from £4,000, and half the assessment fee comes off any implementation of £5,000 or more. If you don't, nothing in the report stops working.
- Why is this £2,500 when I've seen these advertised for £500?
- Because a £500 audit is usually a one-hour call and a document. The questions worth asking any of us are the same: how many of your people do they actually speak to, do they use your real rates or industry averages, and what happens if the numbers turn out to be wrong. Here it is an hour with you, half an hour each with two of the people doing the work, your own figures signed off before anything is built on them, and a refund if they do not hold up.
- What if my business is too unusual for this?
- It probably isn't, and that is not meant as a slight. A plumbing firm and a law practice handle an incoming enquiry almost identically once you strip out the vocabulary — something arrives, someone works out what it is, someone decides who deals with it, someone replies. The specifics of your trade are yours. The shape of the workflow is not unusual at all. If yours turns out to be the exception, I'll tell you on the free call rather than take the money.
- I already have an IT company and an accountant. Where do they fit?
- Where they already are. I don't do licensing, security remediation or finance systems, and I am not trying to replace anyone. The report is written to be handed to them — it names what needs doing and what it depends on, so your IT company can tell you whether it is safe to do and your accountant can tell you whether the numbers work. I would rather they read it than not.