What I do

Stop the phone ringing

Most of the calls a distributor takes are the same call: where is my order. It’s answerable without a human, because the answer is already sitting in your systems.

I set up an email that goes out on its own at each stage — order placed with your supplier, arrived in the UK, checked and labelled, dispatched with a tracking number. Customers stop ringing because they already know.

This is usually the single biggest saving, and there’s no clever technology in it at all.

Draft the replies before you’re in

Overnight enquiries get read, sorted, and answered from your own product manuals and order data. The drafts are waiting in your inbox in the morning.

You read them, change what needs changing, and send them. Nothing goes to a customer without one of you pressing send — that isn’t a setting, it’s how it’s built.

Anything unusual gets flagged and left alone for you. And every question it couldn’t answer becomes something written down, so next time it can.

Get what’s in your head onto paper

In most small trading businesses one person holds the supplier relationship, the pricing logic, which customer is on what terms, and what to do when a shipment sticks in customs.

That’s not a filing problem, it’s a risk. I sit down with you in short sessions and write it down properly: product knowledge, the ordering process, the labelling and compliance checks, your pricing rules.

Once it’s written, it can answer questions on its own — and you can go on holiday.

Fix the email

Moving to Google Workspace, on your own domain, with the addresses you already use. Better spam filtering, shared inboxes so nothing depends on one person being at their desk, and shared folders so documents stop living in whoever happened to receive them.

Unglamorous, and often the thing that gets noticed first.

Test the backup — properly

Almost every small business I look at has a backup. Rather fewer have one that works.

Syncing a live database file to a cloud drive is not a backup: the copy can be mid-write and unrestorable, and if the original gets encrypted, the broken version gets faithfully copied up too.

I set up a real versioned offsite backup and then restore it, in front of you, to prove it works. It costs a few pounds a month and it’s the cheapest insurance in the business.

Clean up the accounting data

Not the bookkeeping — a qualified bookkeeper does the entries, and I’ll say so plainly. What I fix is why year-end takes a week: bank feeds, receipts captured when they arrive rather than in a shoebox, and reporting on top so you can see margin by product line all year instead of in December.

Reports that arrive on their own

A weekly pack on your website and your pipeline: what people searched for, what they did on the site, which quotes have gone quiet, which customers have stopped ordering.

Each one carries one recommendation and one figure that changed. Otherwise it becomes wallpaper by week six.

I don’t promise search rankings. I promise the work and the reporting.

Then I train you and hand over

Short sessions, a one-page cheat sheet you can put on the wall, and a follow-up a fortnight later to fix whatever you got stuck on.

One person on your side gets named as the one who keeps the documentation current. That’s what stops it all going stale the month I step back.

What I don’t do

Being clear about this saves everyone time.

Bookkeeping, VAT returns, statutory accounts. A bookkeeper or accountant does those. I build the plumbing that feeds them.
Legal, tax or financial advice. Not qualified, won’t pretend.
Marketing campaigns and ad management. I’ll report on what’s happening. Running it is someone else’s job.
Replacing systems that work. If your warehouse software does its job, it stays. I build around it.
On-site IT support, hardware, phone systems.

How it runs

An audit first, always — one week, fixed fee, and you own the findings.

Then setup over the following months, one thing at a time. Three new systems dropped on a busy team in the same week is how these projects fail, so each stage has to visibly take something off your plate before the next one starts.

Then a monthly retainer: monitoring, the weekly report, a monthly review with you, and one new automation each quarter.