Most consultancies sell you a timeline and a deck. Here's exactly what we do in 90 days — week by week, no black boxes.
I've run this programme enough times now that I can tell you almost exactly what's going to happen in each phase. Not because every business is the same — they aren't — but because the underlying structure of margin improvement doesn't really change. You find the leaks, you quantify them, you fix them in order of impact, and you make sure the team can keep going after you leave.
That said, I get the same question from nearly every CEO or PE partner before we start: "What are we actually buying here?"
Fair question. So here's the full breakdown — what happens in each phase, what the outputs look like, and where the real value gets created. If you've read our fashion e-commerce case study, this is the methodology behind those results.
We don't start with workshops. We don't start with strategy decks. We start by sitting with your leadership team — CEO, CFO, COO, CTO — and walking through every line of the P&L together.
This is the part that surprises people. I'm not going off to a conference room with my laptop to "analyse the data" and come back in two weeks with a presentation. I'm sitting next to your CFO, asking why that line item jumped 40% quarter-on-quarter. I'm in the room with your CTO, looking at the AWS bill and asking which services are actually load-bearing and which ones nobody's touched since 2023.
During those first two weeks, we cover:
P&L deep dive. Every revenue line, every cost line. Where is gross margin under pressure? Where are operating costs growing faster than revenue? Where have you been meaning to look but never had time?
Tech stack audit. Your SaaS subscriptions, cloud infrastructure, internal tools, data pipelines. I wrote about this in detail in the tech stack margin post — most businesses are paying for 30-40% more tooling than they actually need.
Vendor contracts. When do they renew? What are the terms? Are you on legacy pricing? Have you benchmarked recently? You'd be amazed how many seven-figure contracts auto-renew without anyone checking the market.
Cloud costs. Not just "you're spending too much on AWS" — a proper analysis of what's running, what's oversized, what's sitting idle, and what can be re-architected. Our cloud cost reduction work typically finds 30-50% savings.
Headcount structure. Not "who do we fire" — that's lazy consulting. Instead: where are people doing work that should be automated? Where are you understaffed in areas that directly drive margin? Where is the org structure creating inefficiency?
Pricing approach. How are you setting prices? When did you last change them? Are you leaving money on the table? Are your discounts destroying value?
Fulfilment and operations. What does it cost to get a product or service to a customer? Where does that process break down?
The output of weeks 1-2 is a margin bridge: a single document showing current EBITDA, every identified opportunity, the estimated impact of each, and the total addressable margin improvement. This is the thing the board and investors actually want to see. Every number is tied back to a specific line in the P&L.
I covered the audit methodology in more depth here if you want the full framework.
Now we know where the margin is. The question is: what do we do about it, and in what order?
This phase produces the initiative register — a structured list of every improvement opportunity with four things attached to each one:
We prioritise ruthlessly. High impact, low effort first. Always. If I can save you £20k/month by renegotiating a single vendor contract in week 4, that happens before we start building AI pricing models. Quick wins fund the programme and build momentum with the board.
In our fashion e-commerce engagement, we ended up with 119 individual initiatives on the register. That sounds like a lot, but each one had a clear owner and a clear value. Nobody was guessing.
This is also when we start the first upskilling sessions. Your team needs to understand the AI tools and approaches we're going to deploy. Not at a theoretical level — at a practical, "here's how you use this, here's what it does, here's when it breaks" level. We run hands-on workshops, not lecture-style training. By the end of the engagement, your team should be able to build and maintain these systems without us.
The programme design phase ends with a leadership alignment session. Everyone in the room — CEO, CFO, COO, CTO — looking at the same initiative register, the same numbers, the same timeline. No surprises downstream.
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AI agents and automations. Depending on the business, this typically includes dynamic pricing engines, customer segmentation models, automated reporting, demand forecasting, or operational decision support. These aren't science projects — they're production systems that affect the P&L from day one. Our pricing engine work is a good example of what "deploy fast, measure immediately" looks like in practice.
Infrastructure wins. Cloud cost reductions go live. Database optimizations ship. We've done query optimizations that produced 59,000x speedups — and the margin impact of that kind of improvement is immediate because you're reducing infrastructure spend and improving conversion simultaneously.
Vendor renegotiations. By week 5-6, we've typically completed the first round of vendor renegotiations. New contracts signed, savings hitting the P&L. Sometimes it's replacing an expensive SaaS tool with a purpose-built AI agent. Sometimes it's just picking up the phone and asking for a better rate because you have data showing what the market actually charges. I wrote about the vendor replacement approach here.
Throughout weeks 5-8, we run weekly steering meetings with the leadership team. Every initiative on the register gets reviewed. Green, amber, red. What shipped this week. What the measured impact was. What's blocked and what we're doing about it.
No hiding. No "we'll have the numbers next week." If something isn't working, we kill it and reallocate the effort. If something is outperforming, we double down.
This is usually the phase where the leadership team starts to feel the momentum. Individual wins might be modest — £5k here, £15k there — but they're accumulating fast. And the big structural changes (pricing, cloud, headcount optimisation) are starting to compound.
The final phase is about two things: scaling what works and making sure you don't need us anymore.
Scaling. The AI agents that proved out in weeks 5-8 get extended. The pricing model that worked on one product category rolls out to all of them. The cloud optimizations that saved money in one environment get applied across the board. The discount controls that protected margin on one channel get implemented everywhere.
Killing. Some initiatives won't have worked. That's fine — that's expected. Maybe the customer segmentation model didn't produce meaningful conversion lift. Maybe a vendor renegotiation stalled. We close those out, document why, and move on. No sunk cost fallacy.
Handover. This is the part I care about most. By week 9, your team has been involved in every initiative from the start. They've been in the steering meetings, they've been through the upskilling sessions, and they've been running many of the workstreams themselves. The handover isn't a big-bang knowledge transfer — it's the natural conclusion of a collaborative programme.
What your team owns at the end:
If you want a monthly check-in after the engagement, we do that. Some clients run independently from day 91. Others want a monthly call for the first quarter to keep accountability tight. Either model works.
I've worked inside large consultancies and I've worked with their outputs. The usual model is: send in a team of analysts, spend eight weeks building a deck, present recommendations, leave. Then the client spends six months trying to implement half of it.
That model is broken for margin improvement. Here's why this approach works differently:
We're in the room, not in a silo. I sit with your leadership team. I'm not building a parallel workstream — I'm embedded in your business. That means faster decisions, fewer misunderstandings, and recommendations that actually account for your constraints.
Everything is EBITDA-tracked. Not "estimated savings" or "projected efficiency gains." Every initiative has a measurable impact on EBITDA, and we track it weekly. If a number doesn't move, the initiative gets flagged or killed. This isn't about vanity metrics or impressive-sounding percentages. It's about cash.
We build capability, not dependency. The worst outcome of any engagement is the client needing to hire the same consultants again six months later because nothing stuck. We train your team throughout the 90 days. By the end, they're running the programme. That's the point.
Speed matters. First measurable wins hit by week 5-6. Not month 6. Not "after the implementation phase." If we can't show impact within the first half of the engagement, something is wrong and we address it immediately.
Every business is different, but across our engagements, here's what the pattern looks like:
Weeks 1-4: Margin bridge identifies total addressable improvement — usually 15-40% of operating costs, depending on the business.
Weeks 5-8: First 20-30% of the total improvement is live and measurable. Quick wins (vendor contracts, cloud costs, pricing adjustments) make up the bulk of early impact.
Weeks 9-12: Cumulative improvement reaches 50-70% of the total identified opportunity. The remaining 30-50% sits in the pipeline for the team to execute over the following quarter.
For reference, the fashion e-commerce engagement produced 119 EBITDA-tracked initiatives across seven workstreams, with measurable margin improvement within the first six weeks.
This programme works best for businesses doing £5m-£100m in revenue where margin is under pressure and the leadership team is ready to move fast. If you're a PE-backed business with a value creation plan that mentions "operational efficiency" but nobody's actually executing it — this is built for exactly that situation.
It doesn't work if leadership isn't aligned. If the CEO wants to cut costs but the CTO won't touch the tech stack, we're going to have a problem by week 3. Alignment is a prerequisite, not something we create during the engagement.
If you're not sure whether your business is ready, the easiest first step is a margin audit conversation. Thirty minutes, no commitment. We'll tell you honestly whether there's enough on the table to justify the programme.
The first step is always the audit. Book a call and we'll walk through your P&L together — no decks, no pitches, just an honest look at where the margin is.
We go into businesses and make them permanently more profitable. Every initiative is EBITDA-tracked.