Strategic Innovation. Commercial Creativity.
Strategic Innovation. Commercial Creativity.
Real businesses. Real problems. Real results.
A survey business owner came to a 2-hour Innovation Catalyst session focused entirely on growing his core business. By the end of it, he had a completely new plan involving extending his hire business.
Our Profit, Innovation & Leverage Framework (P.I.L.) revealed something hiding in plain sight - a small hire sideline already generating £60k, sitting on existing assets, requiring no additional staff. To try scaling surveys would mean hiring people. Scaling the hire activity meant leveraging what he already owned.
We doubled down on the hire business. Within the year it hit £120k - almost entirely gross profit - and smoothed out the seasonal peaks and troughs that had been stressing his cashflow for years with surveys.
Same team. Same assets. Different focus.
That's what focusing correctly and being open to innovation does.
A £10m online retailer came to a PIL Catalyst session with one goal - grow to £12m. More marketing. More customers. More revenue.
The real profit leak wasn't a marketing problem. It was two young lads in the warehouse packing orders too fast, with no supervision, causing breakages and a flood of customer service calls. Fix that - properly manage the pack team, eliminate the breakages - and the extra profit they were chasing from £2m of growth was already sitting in the warehouse.
They didn't need £12m turnover. They needed zero breakages.
Same business. Significantly better margins. No marketing spend required (yet). Happier customers. Happier team. And more profit available to spend on marketing when needed.
That's the power of brining creativity, innovation into the business and thinking from a P.I.L. perspective .
A large London hospital research team called us in at crisis point. A digital questionnaire project had overrun badly, the deadline was looming, and a significant sum had already been spent with nothing to show for it. Even if the software miraculously appeared, nobody could answer the bigger question - would GPs actually fill it in?
W ran a workshop. The Profit, Innovation & Leverage process focused on a key element of profit - "time". We cut through the chaos and reached an uncomfortable truth.
The Solution: Scrap the digital project entirely. Refuse to pay for it - the supplier was clearly in breach of multiple delivery criteria. Take the recovered budget and simply print the questionnaire. Then send the team out personally to visit GPs face-to-face. Building rapport and buy-in from GPs.
Result: The research deadline was met. GP participation exceeded expectations. And a project that had been burning money into a software black hole was rescued by a printer and some honest conversations.
Additional thought: Deep down, it's possible that the team already knew the solution, but 'sunk cost fallacy' and avoiding professional embarrassment are powerful motivators to 'keep on going'. We helped make it reality rather than keep wishing the software would somehow materialise.
The call came in. "My office manager has quit. Too much to do, not enough support."
We asked a lot of questions. What we found was remarkable. A £1 million business running off a single Microsoft 365 account, generating invoices in Word, printing them out, and paying a bookkeeper to manually re-enter every single one. Time, money and goodwill - all draining quietly away in the background.
"I'd have quit too", I told him.
The Profit, Innovation & Leverage fix was straightforward. Invest in 'innovating' your systems. They purchase Xero for invoicing and a proper M365 account for each of the team - paid for almost entirely by the bookkeeper hours saved. Simple. Fast. Immediate return.
But here's the best bit. The office manager - a secret geek as it turned out - seeing the value of innovating the business then leveraged MS365 further and built a CRM, automated the sales process with Power Automate, and set up SharePoint to speed up the entire sales operation. Enough for the MD to hire a customer support manager and get back to growing properly.
Nobody quit. Nobody needed to.
Sometimes the most powerful thing innovative strategic thinking does is look under the bonnet before assuming the engine needs replacing.