A workflow audit of the studio's client-onboarding, sourcing, deliverables, and admin processes — with a costed roadmap to recover 33 hours of principal time per week.
Across two weeks of shadowing and stack review we identified 33.5 hours of weekly admin time that adds zero design value. Most of it is concentrated in three places: proposal turnaround, vendor sourcing reconciliation, and the weekly client-update loop.
Removing the bottleneck is a six-week build on tools the studio already pays for, plus one lightweight middleware layer. Modelled honestly, it pays back inside the first additional project — by month four.
A founder-led, design-forward studio operating in the upper-mid residential bracket with a stable book and a clear growth ceiling.
Two weeks. Five stages. Read-only access to live tooling, two shadow sessions, one deep founder interview. No-one was asked to explain anything they didn't already know.
30-min call. Mapped the studio's revenue model, headcount, and the founder's three biggest weekly complaints.
Reviewed Dubsado, Notion, Houzz Pro, the shared Gmail, and twelve months of project P&L's in read-only mode.
Two 90-min observations: one full proposal turnaround end-to-end, and one client weekly-update loop start to finish.
75-min recorded interview with Eleanor. Walked through every tool, every recurring task, every recent dropped ball.
Time-leak analysis, priority ranking by ROI, draft of recommended system, costed roadmap. This document.
From the moment a referral lands to the moment a client signs off the spec pack, the studio touches the project across five tools and 11 manual handoffs. Red lines are wholly manual; amber are semi-automated; green are already automated.
Hours captured from two weeks of timesheet data plus the founder interview. Sourcing, proposal turnaround, and the client-update loop alone account for 65% of the leak.
Ranked by recoverable hours per week × likelihood of clean automation. Severity is the cost of leaving it untouched, not the difficulty of fixing it.
Discovery → signed proposal currently runs 5–9 days. Industry benchmark for studios closing at this fee point is <48 hrs. Founder confirmed: when a proposal goes out same-day, close rate >75%; when it slips past day 3, drop-off is steep.
No single source of truth. Each project rebuilds its own short-list from scratch; ~40% of vendor lookups duplicate work the studio has already done on past projects. Hugo (the dog) has, in fairness, never lost a sourcing email.
Eleanor and the PM each spend ~45 min per active project assembling progress notes, photo updates, and supplier status into a bespoke email. Most of the underlying data already exists in Notion — it's the assembly that costs.
Dubsado is the contractual record; Notion is the working record. Updates to one don't reach the other. Status in Dubsado was out-of-date on 4 of 7 active projects we sampled.
Once a vendor is locked, its details should flow straight into the spec pack. Today they're re-typed, often from scratch, and the SKU numbers don't always match the PO that gets sent.
~30% of discovery calls are clearly out-of-scope by minute three (budget under £30k, timeline mismatched, project type the studio doesn't take). A short pre-call form would deflect most of these without reading rude.
70% of revenue is referral-led, but there's no trigger that asks a satisfied client for an introduction at the moment of sign-off. We modelled even a soft 25% take-up at one ask per completed project: roughly £180k of additional pipeline a year.
All four sit on top of the studio's existing tools. We don't add a new CRM. We make the ones you already pay for talk to each other and quietly pre-fill the work you'd otherwise do by hand.
From discovery-call notes (auto-transcribed) to a ready-to-send branded proposal sitting in Eleanor's drafts within two hours. She edits a paragraph; it goes out the same day.
Every vendor the studio has ever used, every quote received, every lead-time observed — searchable, taggable, photo-linked. New projects begin from a curated short-list, not a blank inbox search.
Every Friday at 8am, each active client gets a draft progress email pre-loaded with this week's photos, supplier ETAs, and outstanding decisions. Eleanor or the PM glance, edit one line, hit send.
Sign-off in Dubsado fires a 14-day-later, hand-written-feeling email asking the client for a single warm intro. We ran the same trigger for an interior-design client last year — 17 warm conversations, 3 signed projects.
Built incrementally so the studio sees value from week 2. Each phase ends with a working module live in production, documented, with a hand-off SOP.
All tiers include documentation, monitoring, written SOPs, and a 60-day fix window. Recommended is the full system as scoped above; the alternatives are if you want to start narrower or run lighter.
Modelled on the Full System tier with conservative assumptions: only 3 of the modelled 4 extra projects materialise in year one, founder hourly value held flat at £180/hr, no upside applied to close-rate lift.
If the recommendations land, the next step is a 30-minute scoping call to confirm Phase 01 scope, lock the start date, and put a deposit invoice in your inbox by end of day.