How We Work

Diagnosis, build, deployment.

Every engagement follows the same three phases with defined deliverables at each one. You receive a quantified proposal before any commitment, and you see the arithmetic that produced it.

Single solution: four to six weeks end to end
Essential bundle: six to seven weeks
Growth bundle: eight to ten weeks
Scale bundle: ten to twelve weeks
Enterprise: twelve to sixteen weeks

Take the Operational Health Scorecard

Phase I

Diagnosis

Duration: Three to seven days
Your time: Four to six hours of your team's time
Fee: £2,500, credited in full against implementation

Process documentation

Questionnaires, review of existing documentation, and interviews of fifteen to thirty minutes with each stakeholder. We are learning the business context as much as the systems — which processes are critical and which are merely habitual.

Quantification

We calculate what the problems actually cost: hours spent at loaded cost, direct spend wasted, and capital held where it earns nothing. This is where the figures on our solution pages are replaced by yours.

Integration mapping

Every system the automation must reach — Shopify, warehouse and 3PL platforms, ad platforms, communication tools, and your financial systems.

Success criteria

The metrics we will be measured against, the baseline we are measuring from, and the review points at thirty, sixty and ninety days. A baseline recorded now is the only way to prove anything later.

Deliverable — a written proposal within three to five working days

Current state with quantified costs
What we propose to build
The integration architecture
A week-by-week timeline
The investment
The modelled return under conservative, expected and optimistic assumptions

If the arithmetic does not justify the build, the proposal says so. This happens.

The diagnosis is £2,500, credited in full against implementation if you proceed. We are paid the same whether the answer is yes or no, which is the point of charging for it. Enterprise diagnosis is quoted separately.

Phase II

Build

Duration: Two to four weeks for a single solution, depending which one. Four to ten weeks for a bundle.
Your time: Two to four hours weekly

Week one — foundation

System access, development environment, initial integration testing against staging data, and baseline measurement.

Weeks two to three — core development

Your business rules and thresholds implemented, every required integration built, error handling and edge cases resolved, tested against sample data.

Week four — refinement

Testing against your real operational data in staging, performance work, documentation, and a demonstration to your stakeholders.

Weeks five to six — bundles only

Cross-solution integration testing, load testing, training materials, and deployment sign-off.

Communication

Weekly written progress notes covering what is complete, what is next, and any blockers. Questions answered within four business hours. Fortnightly demonstrations of working functionality.

For agency partners

We work behind you and you retain the client relationship. You receive progress updates written for forwarding, demonstration recordings you can share, and written answers to client questions for you to relay.

Deliverable — production-ready automation

Technical documentation
Operational documentation written for your team
Training materials
A deployment checklist

Phase III

Deployment

Duration: One to two weeks
Your time: Six to eight hours of your team's time

Go-live

Staged rollout, usually beginning with a single product line or location, with live monitoring and gradual expansion. Rollback procedure defined before we start.

Training

One to two hours of live training with your key people, recorded for reference, with hands-on practice against the real system.

Active monitoring

Daily for the first three days, then every other day for the following week, then weekly. We are watching reliability, expected against actual outcomes, team adoption, and edge cases testing did not surface.

Threshold refinement

The first configuration is never quite right. Alert sensitivity, reorder points, days-of-cover targets and routing rules are all tuned against real operational behaviour during this period.

Deliverable — a live system and a team that can run it

Baseline metrics showing actual against expected performance

Ongoing: monitoring and adjustment

Automation is not a static asset. The platforms it depends on change their APIs and their behaviour without notice, your product mix moves, and thresholds set at £3M are wrong at £8M. The retainer exists because of this, and it is part of every engagement rather than an upsell.

It is contracted for the first twelve months alongside implementation, then rolls monthly and can be ended with notice. You own the system outright either way — the retainer covers maintenance and adjustment, not access.

Platform change remediation

When Shopify, Meta, Google or your 3PL alters an API, we identify it and repair the integration. This is the most common reason automation stops working, and it is not a question of whether but when.
Threshold adjustment

As volume grows, the logic that was correct becomes wrong. We revise it rather than waiting for you to notice it has drifted.
Monthly performance reporting

Hours saved and costs avoided, measured against the baseline recorded in Phase I. If the system is not delivering what we modelled, the report says so.
Response times

Questions answered within four business hours. Critical failures — a system that has stopped functioning — addressed the same working day. Scoped logic changes built and deployed within seven days.

Monthly retainer by scope of engagement
Scope	Monthly
Single solution	£500–£800
Growth bundle	£1,000–£1,300
Scale bundle	£1,500–£1,800
Enterprise	Included

Questions

What if we need changes after launch?

Threshold and rule adjustments are covered by the retainer. New integrations or substantial logic changes are scoped and quoted separately.

Can we see examples of what you have built?

We can demonstrate anonymised logic during diagnosis. Client implementations are confidential, which is also true of yours.

What if our systems have no API?

Anything with a structured export — CSV, database access, or a scheduled report — can be worked with. Genuinely closed systems are rare, and we will tell you during diagnosis if yours is one.

Do we need technical staff?

No. Your team needs to understand your own operational processes and be available for training. The implementation is ours.

Do we own what you build?

Yes, outright. There is no third-party licence and no vendor lock-in. The retainer is contracted for the first twelve months and rolls monthly afterwards; it covers maintenance and adjustment, not access. If you end it, the system remains yours and the documentation goes with it.

What does the diagnosis cost?

£2,500, credited in full against implementation if you proceed. Enterprise diagnosis is quoted separately. It covers three to seven days of process documentation, quantification against your own figures, integration mapping and a written proposal. If you would rather establish a rough figure before committing to anything, the Operational Health Scorecard is free and takes about four minutes.

What happens if the diagnosis says no?

You pay the £2,500 diagnosis fee and we do not build. Nothing further is charged. It is a better outcome than an engagement neither of us can defend, and it is why the fee exists — we are paid the same either way, so the recommendation is not influenced by whether you buy.

Operational health

Establish the figure for your store

The Operational Health Scorecard returns a modelled leakage figure in about four minutes.