Proved it before pitching it
Quietly automated the lead follow-up inside their existing CRM. A week of manual chasing, done in about an hour.
Nobody had asked for it. The result is what earned the mandate to redesign the rest.
Case study
Mike's real estate business: from founder-dependent to founder-free.
01 · The starting point
£40M a year, run on paper.
Mike's company was turning close to £40M a year when we started. And its sales were tracked on paper. Notebooks, not systems. A CRM the company had paid handsomely for, used as a spreadsheet. Every customer interaction manual. Every touch, Mike's personal touch.
Leads arrived by email, one at a time, and were chased by hand over WhatsApp. Ten or fifteen a day was enough to swamp the team, and no way to grow past it without piling on bodies. No KPIs anyone actually owned. Every important decision, relationship and sale ran back through the founder. The business was not underperforming. It was impressive. It was just, quietly, unable to run a day without him.
02 · What we actually did 01 02 03 04 05 06
We did not swap a tool. We rebuilt how the business runs.
The instinct is to reach for software. We did the opposite. The system came last. Six pieces of work, in roughly this order:
The lead-to-sale engine
Rebuilt the sales engine on a CRM that actually fit: Kommo, not the barely-used Zoho they were paying for. Leads from any source now flow in, self-assign and follow up on their own.
Software came last. Once the process was designed, the right tool was the easy part. The bill fell by roughly half.
Aftersales into company memory
Every deal, from first contact to close to handover for renovation and letting, mapped and automated across Kommo, Make.com and Google Workspace.
The know-how moved off people's laptops and into the business. Aftersales workload dropped by around half.
Lead acquisition & referral economics
Reworked the ad and agency contracts, and built referral structures, including fee-earning arrangements with CPA firms.
Growth stopped depending on Mike personally writing every ad and preparing every pitch.
Organisation, RACI & playbooks
Responsibility maps and written SOPs across the business, from the website to the email campaigns.
Everyone knew their job, so decisions stopped routing back to the founder for a verdict.
The management cockpit
API-connected dashboards for budget, marketing and advertising. The numbers, live, in one place.
Mike finally saw the bottlenecks instead of being one.
03 · How we rolled it out
One country first. Earn the trust. Then everywhere.
We did not rip the old way out and impose the new one. We ran it in one country first: a cheap prototype, not a manifesto. It had to prove itself before anyone would let it touch the rest.
It did. The pilot's results built the belief to roll the redesigned way of working out across the whole business, which grew from three countries to seven over the course of the work. Process design came first. The tool came last.
04 · The results · the founder's estimate
A year in, the business runs on its architecture, not on one person.
~+45% operational capacity
~+60% sales
~+40% customers processed
~−55% sales closing time
Estimates, not an audit. Mike's own read of the change, after the systems were in.
"Thanks to what you've built, we now work more efficiently and effectively than I could have imagined. I have even started taking holidays where I go days without looking at my phone."
Mike, founder
That first year, he took his first uninterrupted family holiday in fifteen years. His total involvement while away: one phone call, to approve payments.
05 · What changed for Mike
He did not want to stop deciding. He wanted to stop doing everything.
Mike could have hired someone. A chief operating officer, a number two to take it all off his hands. He did not, and not for lack of money. He would have had to hand the whole operation to one person and trust them with it, and that was not a trust he could give. What he needed was not a deputy. It was time, and a system he could still steer.
So that is what we built. He still approves the payments. He is still in the decisions that matter. But he is the person who decides now, not the person who does everything. A new hire would have taken the doing and the deciding both. The architecture handed him the deciding back, without the doing.
Now, on a Sunday morning over coffee, Mike reads the whole week in about an hour. What the ads cost and what they returned, how the leads fell to each salesperson, who is likely to close what, where customers sit in the pipeline, the month's cash flow and P&L. Preparing those reports used to take the whole of Sunday.
The core build took twelve months, and the daily dependency was gone inside that year. The relationship continues, lighter now, two days a month, by Mike's choice, as the business is readied, in time, to stand entirely on its own or change hands.
06 · The lesson
Technology was not the fix. Process design was.
The expensive CRM had not been the problem. The problem was that no one had designed how the business should actually run, so the tool had nothing to carry. Once the org, the KPIs, the processes and the relationships were in place, the right system was the easy part.
It is the opposite of what most consultancies do. I watched dozens of six-figure strategy decks die on a shelf. Months of analysis, a big presentation, then a roadmap no one could implement. Reports do not transform businesses. Implementation does.
"So we do not write the plan and leave. We build it with you."
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