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The growing business that runs on spreadsheets

Business is good and the team is growing. But day-to-day work is still held together by spreadsheets, a lot of copy and paste and the memory of two or three people.

• To get a number you have to ask the one person who knows how to pull it from the CRM.
• The same data is typed two or three times into different tools.
• When someone goes on holiday, some tasks stop.
• Every month someone spends an afternoon building the same report by hand.
• Each team has its own sales figure, and they do not match.

The first step is to decide where each piece of data lives and who owns it, and then to automate what repeats. Sometimes an agent that answers questions about your own data fits too. That way anyone can find the number without having to ask, and the monthly report stops eating an afternoon.

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The company with a sales team and incoming contacts

Contacts reach you through the website, campaigns or referrals, and a sales team has to follow them up.

• Someone decides by hand, at the end of the day, which contact gets called first.
• Good contacts wait as long as the ones who weren't going to buy.
• There is no reliable way to tell which campaign each customer came from.
• The salesperson goes into the call without knowing what the customer looked at or asked.
• Every sales proposal is written from scratch.

What usually works is a system that reads every contact, judges whether it fits and passes it to whoever should take it, with the context ready. So your team calls the most likely buyers first and goes into the call knowing what to talk about.

Tell me which task to hand over

The remote or distributed team

People work from different places and at different hours, so the company lives in chat, video calls, email and shared documents.

• A decision is made in a chat thread and a month later it's hard to find.
• To know how something is done you have to ask, because it isn't written down anywhere.
• Some meetings exist only to catch up on what was already said in writing.
• A new person takes weeks to find out where everything is.

It helps to decide where each kind of information lives and who keeps it up to date, and then give the team an easy way to ask and find it. That way decisions stay on record, and new people find things without having to ask. I go into it at more length in “Your company is already a system”.

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The company where everyone uses their own AI

Your company hasn't approved any AI tool, but half the team already uses one with a personal account to write, summarise or analyse.

• You have seen someone paste a contract or a customer list into an AI chat.
• There is no written rule on which data can be used with AI and which can't.
• Texts reach customers without a careful review.
• You couldn't say which AI tools your team uses today.

What I suggest is bringing order without banning it: an approved tool, a brief policy on how to use it, clear data rules and hands-on training. It follows what Article 4 of the AI Act asks for, so your team keeps using AI while you know which data leaves and where it goes. I explain it in “Shadow AI”.

Ask about training

The company whose website only informs

The website gets visits and looks good, but it works like an old-fashioned brochure: it informs and waits.

• A message that arrives on Friday afternoon isn't answered until Monday.
• You don't know which pages customers read before writing to you, or where they leave.
• No one has checked whether the website can be used with the keyboard only or with a screen reader.
• On mobile it's slow to load and the form is awkward.
• You don't know whether your website meets the privacy and accessibility rules.

Think of the website as your first employee, one that answers at any hour by text, voice or phone and alerts the team when someone needs a person. And on top of that, anyone should be able to use it, keyboard and screen reader included. I go into it in “Your website as your first employee”.

Tell me which task to hand over

The company that kept chaining tools together

Over the years, apps, connections between them and automations have piled up, and each one came in at the time to solve a specific problem.

• There is no map of which data moves from one tool to another.
• When an automation breaks, you find out when a customer complains.
• You pay for tools and can no longer remember why you signed up.
• There are processes where an AI decides something and no one checks what it decided.

A systems and flows diagnosis fits here, and you get a map of the tools your team uses, what data passes through each one and where AI makes decisions. I read that map two ways, looking for where there is risk and where hours are lost. And bear in mind that the diagnosis finds problems, but it does not certify compliance.

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The company that handles many customer questions

Every day, questions come in by email, phone, chat or social media, many of them quite alike, and still the team answers them one by one.

• Every week your team answers the same questions about delivery times, prices or the status of an order.
• A customer asks on two channels and gets two different answers.
• Complaints get solved, but no one looks at what causes them.
• Outside office hours, questions pile up until the next day.

An agent works well here: it answers the questions that repeat, using your real information, and passes the ones that need judgement to a person, with the case summed up. So your team spends its time on the customers who really need it, and along the way you see which questions come in and why.

Tell me which task to hand over

The company buried in invoices, orders and paperwork

Supplier invoices, orders, delivery notes and contracts arrive by email or as PDFs, and someone has to read them and copy the data by hand.

• Someone spends hours copying data from invoices or orders into another tool.
• A wrongly copied amount turns up weeks later, when the accounts do not add up.
• To know whether an order was delivered and invoiced, you have to look in three places.
• Contract and payment deadlines depend on one person's reminders.

What fits here is a system that reads each document, pulls out the data and puts it where it belongs, and tells a person when something does not add up. So your team stops copying by hand and keeps only what needs their judgement.

Tell me which task to hand over

The company that pays others for work that repeats

Every month you pay an agency, a supplier or your own team for tasks that follow the same steps over and over.

• You pay by the hour and don't know what each result costs.
• You check what you receive by hand, because it isn't written down what a job well done looks like.
• Your team spends hours qualifying leads, preparing reports or checking case files.
• When volume grows, the only way out is hiring or paying for more hours.

The way out is to hand that task to AI, and before starting we agree in writing when it will be considered finished and what it costs. I explain it step by step in “How I work”.

Tell me which task to hand over