Case study · de-identified on purpose
Six days, unaided.
We didn't build her a dashboard. She built four things herself in under a week, and the only reason she could is that how she'd decide was already written down where her tools could read it.
6days
from first login to a live view of every open deal
4builds
none of them ours
2weeks
for an audit that normally runs six
0files
left her own accounts
We won't tell you who she is. That's the policy, not a gap.
CHIP de-identifies every case study on purpose. Our whole job is giving a client leverage over their market. If we published how a named client runs, we'd be handing that leverage to whoever competes with them. So what you'll read here is the mechanism: the shape of the problem, what we did, what changed. Not the industry, not the size of the team, not where they're based.
It's a rule about what we publish, not about what you can check. If you're seriously considering this, we'll set up a reference call with a client who's agreed to take it, and you can ask them whatever you like.
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→The problem was never disorganisation
Everyone in the business was doing their job properly. The person negotiating knew what was being negotiated; the person invoicing knew what had been billed. The failures happened in the gaps between them: a brief buried in a thread, a fee that never became an invoice, a renewal nobody clocked. Nothing was dropped, because nothing was being held.
Her version of it sounds like every founder who calls us. Clients ask for you by name. Everything gets sent to you. There's so much going on all the time that you're always about to drop a ball, and everyone on the team says the same thing: I feel like I'm missing something. You're not even sure where you're the bottleneck, because you're the bottleneck everywhere.
The most expensive version of it is the smallest: a client asks for something that's already at the top of the thread, so she goes back through it and retypes what she already sent. Thirty minutes to deliver information that had been delivered.
→What she built, and what we didn't
We built none of the following. She did, in her own accounts, inside the first two weeks:
- A client database. One record per relationship instead of one spreadsheet per crisis: who's who, how to reach them, what's been done for them.
- A live view of every open deal, assembled out of a contract folder that had until then been a folder.
- A shortlist, pulled from a back catalogue nobody had time to read.
- Four briefs answered in a single pass, in the house voice, because the system had read how her colleagues already write.
She has built two more since. Our part was the layer underneath: her files, her mail, her records, and a way for all of it to be asked a question.
→Why she kept opening it
Most software fails here. A tool that asks you to learn a database before it becomes useful gets opened once. The burden belongs on the software, not on the person using it.
She doesn't open a grid. She asks a question and gets an answer. Keeping everyone organised, making sure things don't fall through the cracks: that stops being the thing she carries in her head and becomes the system's. The database is a consequence of the work rather than a precondition for it.
“It's been really helping me streamline my workflow. I can really see this coming together over time.”
Week two
→What it cost, and what she kept
An operations audit that normally runs six weeks ran in two. Nothing left her own accounts: her Drive, her mail, her records, under her login. If she stopped tomorrow she'd keep every file and every database. What she'd lose is the layer that reads across them, not the work itself.
Pricing is published rather than quoted. See what it costs.
→What we left out, and why
Nothing here names the operator, her company, her colleagues or her clients. There's no industry, no team size, no region and no figure that points at the account, because any two of those together are enough to find a real person in a small market. Every quotation is verbatim from a recorded call.
We'd rather publish a version that costs her nothing than a stronger one that hands her competitors a map. If you need more than this to decide, ask for the reference call.