Simple processes for growing businesses
Most small businesses don't have broken processes.
They have workflows that worked until the business got bigger.
I'm Paul. I've spent most of my career in media agencies, running complex media investment operations for brands such as Amazon, McDonald's, Jaguar Land Rover and British Gas.
The clients and budgets changed in size, but the problems didn’t. Work spread across multiple files, repetitive tasks and small spreadsheet errors started causing bigger issues.
Part of my role was stepping in when things got messy, understanding what was going wrong and then getting the work flowing properly again.
Over the years this meant cutting an annual planning cycle from two weeks to six hours.
Reducing media plan revisions from over an hour to under ten minutes.
Building a forecasting tool that gave senior leadership real-time visibility of advertising spend.
I also co-ordinated a vendor database across 21 international markets and designed a spreadsheet that let a team optimise 40,000 media placements in hours rather than days.
None of this was done with new or expensive software.
It was done by structuring information properly, simplifying workflows and using spreadsheets as practical tools rather than as basic calculators. Excel and Google Sheets, used properly, can do more than most businesses realise, without the cost or complexity of a new system.
This same approach applies to small businesses as the underlying problems are often the same.
I’ll use automation where it helps, but I’ve learned that if the process underneath is broken, automation just creates chaos at a faster rate.
Fix the process first. Then automation can make things smarter.
In three to four days, I'll find the one admin problem that's costing you time, money and patience and fix it properly.
No jargon. No strategy decks. No endless meetings.
If your working day feels harder than it should, let’s unclutter it.