Case study · talent management · five-person team
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 the judgment was already in the system.
6days
from first login to a working deal dashboard
4builds
none of them ours
2weeks
for an audit that normally runs six
0files
left her own accounts
The problem was never disorganisation.
Every individual 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 commission that never became an invoice, a renewal nobody clocked. Nothing was dropped, because nothing was being held.
“They keep harassing me for information that's literally at the top of the thread. They're just not reading.”
The operator, on her own clients
So she goes back through the thread and retypes what she already sent. Thirty minutes to deliver information that was already delivered.
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→What she built, and what we didn't
We built none of the following. She did, in her own accounts, inside the first six days:
- A client database. Directory, contacts, addresses, demographics, performance. One record per relationship instead of one spreadsheet per crisis.
- A live deal dashboard, assembled out of a contract folder that had until then been a folder.
- A podcast guest list, pulled from a back catalogue nobody had time to read.
- Four brand 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 the team adopting it was never in doubt
Most software fails here. Three of her five colleagues aren't technical. In her own words, not confident wrapping a cell in a spreadsheet, and any tool that asks them to learn a grid gets opened once.
They don't open a grid. They ask a question and get an answer, scoped to what their role needs to see. 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 keeps 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.
→Why this is de-identified
The operator gave verbal permission to talk about the work. She hasn't signed anything, so nothing here names her, her company, her colleagues or her clients, and no figure in it identifies the account. Every quotation is verbatim from a recorded call.
We'd rather publish a weaker version we're entitled to publish than a stronger one we're not.