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Pricing · Process & System Review

What it costs,and what moves it.

What a business process review costs, and what moves the number. It depends on what needs doing, so here are some actual numbers rather than a rate card.

First session freePaid work from £950Fixed price, agreed up front
60UK firms doing this kind of work that we looked at before writing this
12Gave any indication at all of what they charge
5Said anything meaningful about genuinely comparable work

Almost everyone makes you get on a call first. We are not going to publish a rate card either, because a grid of packages would tell you what box you fit rather than what your problem costs. What follows is the entry points, what moves the number, and what happens if you cannot afford it.

Three ways this starts

Not everything begins with an invoice

Always free

The Starting Point

Free

A single focused conversation. Its job is to establish whether there is a problem worth investigating, whether we are likely to be useful, and whether you need to pay us anything at all.

It can perfectly well end with us saying you do not. That happens, and it is a good outcome. You will come away knowing roughly what a piece of work would involve and what it would cost, before committing to anything.

Most engagements

Paid work

From £950

That is the smallest engagement worth either of us doing properly, not a headline price with conditions attached.

A Process and System Review typically takes one to five days of our work, depending on how much of the business we need to understand. A focused look at one process might take a day. Several connected processes across teams and systems will take longer.

Larger projects, software, brand, implementation, are scoped and priced separately on the work involved. Building something is not the same shape of job as reviewing a process and should not be priced as though it were.

Selective

Mowbray Backed

Sometimes nothing

Occasionally we meet a founder or an early business with something we think genuinely deserves a chance, and not enough budget to buy the help it needs.

Where we believe there is real merit in it, we may contribute some or all of our time without charge. For larger pieces we may look at reduced fees, deferred fees, or in the right circumstances an equity arrangement.

There is no application form and no formula for qualifying. But a small budget will not automatically rule you out, and it is worth asking rather than assuming.

What actually moves the price

Headcount is a poor guide

A hundred-person business can have one simple process. A twelve-person business can have six systems, three workarounds and everything depending on one person’s memory.

Usually less
One problem, one process
A handful of systems
One or two people who understand it
One team
One site
Usually more
+Several connected processes
+Several teams
+More systems in the chain
+Multiple locations, where location genuinely changes the work
+More people we need to talk to
Fixed, agreed up front.Those are things you can count about your own business before you speak to us, so we can price it quickly. The price is agreed before any work starts and it does not move. You are not buying days, and if it takes us longer than we expected that is our problem rather than yours.
Your time

Most of the work is ours, not yours

This is the question people worry about most and almost nobody answers. Preparation, mapping, analysis, researching options and writing the plan all happen on our time.

FROM EACH PERSON

About 1 hour

Roughly what we need from each person we speak to, plus whatever documentation already exists.

SMALL FOCUSED REVIEW

2 to 3 staff hours

Total across everyone involved, spread over the people who actually do the work.

WIDER REVIEW

10 to 15 staff hours

Total across everyone involved, where the review runs across several functions.

To be clear.Those are total staff hours across everyone involved. Speaking to five people for an hour each is five staff hours. It does not mean five people out of the business for a day. And if the documentation does not exist, that is fine. We are not going to ask you to document your processes before paying us to understand your processes.
What you actually get

Not a report that gets filed

An improvement plan

A map of how the work happens now, including the workarounds and the steps only one person knows. A register of what is getting in the way and what it costs you. A picture of how it should work instead.

The gap between the two, turned into specific recommendations with an indication of impact, effort and cost. And a record of the options we considered and rejected, so nobody reopens them in six months.

The one that gets used

A one-page roadmap

Four columns. This is the one that gets circulated, printed and argued over, rather than filed.

Now
Next
Later
Do not bother
Not automatically software.Recommendations might be a changed process, a removed step, clearer ownership, better use of something you already pay for, an off-the-shelf product, an integration, some automation, training, or leaving something alone. We build software, so we are careful not to conclude that everything needs building.
If we do the work as well

You are not charged twice for the same thinking

Where we go on to deliver what the review recommends, we take account of the work already done.
If you sign a retainer, the review fee is waived entirely. That is not a discount. Some of that discovery would have had to happen inside the implementation anyway.
The review stands on its own regardless. You own the output. Take it to your existing supplier, take it to someone else, do it yourselves, or do nothing with it.
When not to buy one

A review is not automatically the right purchase

Just because something is going wrong. Do not buy one if any of these describe you.

You already understand the problem and the fix is obvious
The problem costs you less than the review would
You are early enough that there are no real processes to review yet
What you actually need is help configuring a product you have already chosen
There is no realistic capacity or budget to act on the findings afterwards

A plan nobody has the time or money to act on is an expensive document. If that is where you are, we will say so in the free session rather than sell you one anyway.

Show us how the work gets done now.

Tell us how you want it to work and we will work out the gap. We do not qualify businesses by size or budget. We qualify the work, the opportunity, and whether we can make a real difference.

We will tell you what you need, what it would cost, or whether you need it at all.