Three signs your UK SME has outgrown its current operating model
An operating model is simply how work gets decided and done. The one that carried a business to twenty people rarely carries it to sixty, and the strain shows up in the same three places.
1. Every decision still crosses one desk
A discount above ten per cent, a new hire, a refund, a supplier change. If all of them wait for the founder, the queue is the business's real speed limit. Count how many approvals sat for more than two days last month.
2. You hear about problems from customers
Late deliveries and billing errors should surface in a number before they surface in a complaint. If Monday's meeting runs on anecdotes, there is no reporting, only memory.
3. New hires take months to become useful
When the way things are done lives in three people's heads, every joiner learns by interrupting them. Those three people are also the ones you can least afford to slow down.
The fix is rarely a reorganisation. Write down who decides what and up to what value. Pick five numbers the leadership team reviews every week. Document the ten processes that run most often, in the words of the people who run them.
What overseas founders get wrong about entering the UK market
The UK is an easy place to register a company and a harder place to win a first customer. Most of the mistakes we see come from confusing the two.
Treating incorporation as market entry
Registering a limited company can be done online in about a day. A UK business bank account for a company with overseas directors can take weeks, and VAT registration, payroll and a usable contract template all come after that. Plan the first quarter around those, not around the certificate.
Bringing the home playbook unchanged
UK buyers tend to ask for references, written terms and a named point of contact before they commit. Larger customers will run a formal procurement process with supplier questionnaires. A proposition that sold on relationship and speed at home needs paperwork here.
Hiring a salesperson before testing the offer
A UK sales hire is expensive and cannot fix pricing or positioning that has not been tested locally. Twenty conversations with target customers, led by the founder, usually tell you more than the first six months of a new hire's pipeline.
Leaving compliance until a customer asks
Data protection, employment law and sector regulators all have UK-specific rules. Find out which apply to you before the first contract, because the customer's legal team will ask.
Why most consulting deliverables fail, and how we structure ours differently
Most consulting reports are written for the meeting where they are presented. The people who have to act on them open the file the following Monday and cannot tell what they are supposed to do first.
The pattern is familiar. Forty recommendations with equal weight. No name against any of them. Dates given as "short term" and "medium term". Analysis in the main body, actions in an appendix.
What we write instead
Our recommendation is a written plan, and it is short. Each action has three things attached: a priority, an owner inside your business, and a date. If we cannot name the owner, the action is not ready to go in the plan.
We also limit how much goes in. A team that is still running the business can usually carry a handful of changes at once, so we rank everything and say plainly what should wait.
What happens after the document
We stay engaged through delivery, and we check in at 30, 60 and 90 days. Those reviews ask whether each action happened and whether it produced the result we expected. If it did not, the plan changes.
The 90-day plan: a template for post-consulting execution
A plan survives contact with a busy company when it is broken into three months, each with a different job. This is the template we hand over at the end of an engagement.
Days 1 to 30: start and prove
Confirm one owner for each action and put the dates in their calendar. Pick the two changes that are quickest to finish and finish them. Set up the weekly numbers you will use to judge the rest, and record where they stand today.
Days 31 to 60: the hard middle
This is where the larger changes run: a new pricing structure, a reporting line that moves, a process that gets rebuilt. Hold a 30-minute review every fortnight. Each owner answers three questions: what is done, what is late, what is in the way.
Days 61 to 90: make it normal
Move the new ways of working into job descriptions, onboarding notes and the regular management meeting. Compare the weekly numbers with the day-one baseline. Decide what goes into the next 90 days and what gets dropped.
One page, not a deck
The whole plan should fit on a single page: action, owner, date, status. If it needs more room than that, there are too many actions on it.
