For businesses with several locations
In a business with several locations, small differences between sites can add up.
In businesses like this it is common for each site to build its own habits, and for manual work to spread across so many people that the total is hard to see. Whether that is true for you is what we would want to learn first. We start with one part of the operation and show you what is there.
What we might look at.
We sit with the people in the part of the business we are looking at. These are the sorts of questions we ask, and which ones matter depends on what we find.
Head office and accounts
How supplier invoices arrive, who keys them in, how long approvals take, and how much month-end reporting is copying numbers from one place to another.
IT
How many separate systems the stores touch in a day, which ones talk to each other, and who gets the call when one does not. Also what staff are already doing with AI tools on their own, and whether that is safe.
Maintenance
How a store reports a broken fryer or a leaking roof, how the request is tracked, and how anyone at head office knows whether it was fixed.
The stores themselves
How schedules get built, how a new hire learns the job and who confirms they were trained, how stock counts and daily reports are done, and how a manager gets an answer from head office.
If you are already using AI, you have a head start.
Owners who have started using AI themselves often get further than they expected. Time and visibility can become the limits: there may be no time to take it further, and it is hard to see the whole business from the middle of it.
We build on what you have already started. We spend the hours you do not have, follow one workflow from end to end, and come back with a ranked list. Some items you will want to keep doing yourselves. Some we can build and keep running.
What the report looks like.
Here is a short, made-up example so you can see the shape of it. It is an illustration only and not drawn from any client.
Maintenance requests go by phone and text
One simple form with a photo, a ticket number and a status the store can see
Low effort, high return
New staff training tracked on paper at each store
Online training with a test and a certificate, with results visible at head office
Low effort, high return
Daily sales and waste reports retyped into a spreadsheet
Collect once at the store, roll up automatically
Medium effort, high return
Supplier invoices keyed in by hand
Read invoices automatically, with a person approving each one
Medium effort, medium return
A customer-facing chatbot
Not yet. The basics above will pay back faster
Revisit later
The real report goes further. For each item it covers who would own it, what data is involved and who should be allowed to see it, where a person must still approve, and how you would know it was working.
One finding, from an illustrative sample report
Finding. Store faults take about 4.5 days to fix, but the repair itself usually happens within a day. The rest is the report waiting, or being explained again.
Evidence. Measured: 9 of 20 recent fault records needed a follow-up call. Estimated: the coordinator spends 5 to 7 hours a week chasing status, by their own account.
Recommendation. Start with a shared fault log and a simple priority rule, not a ticketing system. At about 45 faults a month, new software would cost more than the problem.
Worth it if. The coordinator keeps the log up to date every day.
How we would test it. After 30 days: follow-up calls under 20% of reports, and under 3 days from report to fix.
Invented business and figures, shown to illustrate the reasoning. Ask us and we will send the full sample report.
One thing you can use straight away
Training across every store.
We built our own training platform: slides, a test, a certificate with the learner's name, reminders, and a results page for head office. For a business with many sites and a lot of new hires, it replaces the paper trail.
It is already in use with a Nassau firm. You can see more on our work page, and we can show it to you live.
How we would start.
- A 25 minute call to hear how the business runs and decide whether a closer look is worth your time.
- We agree the workflow, the people and locations involved, the timing and a fixed fee in writing before we start. Any wider work has its own scope and fee, agreed separately before it begins.
- We do the interviews and the walkthroughs, then hand you the written report and go through it with you.
- You decide what happens next. You can take the list and run with it, or ask us to build and look after some of it.
Tell us what is slowing your team down.
A 25 minute call is enough to tell whether there is something worth fixing. If there is, we will say what we would look at first. If there is not, we will say that too.