We brought Trusted Clarity in to figure out why our margins were shrinking despite growing revenue. Within three weeks, their consultant had identified that we were under-pricing two of our five service lines and over-staffing a third. The diagnostic report was direct and specific. We implemented the pricing changes within a month and saw a 9 per cent margin improvement in the following quarter.
I was sceptical about hiring a consultant because the last one we used gave us a 60-page report that nobody read. The difference here was that the same person who did the analysis also sat with my warehouse team and helped redesign our pick-and-pack process. Labour hours per order dropped by 22 per cent. That is real, measured, and it stuck after they left.
The advisory retainer has been worth every penny. Having a consultant who already knows our business join our monthly leadership meeting keeps us honest about what we said we would do versus what we actually did. They ask the uncomfortable questions that nobody on the internal team wants to raise. We have been on the retainer for eleven months now and I plan to continue.
Our sales team was closing deals but the handover to project delivery was chaotic. Trusted Clarity mapped the entire process, identified four points where information was being lost, and built a simple checklist system that our project managers now use for every new client. Customer complaints about onboarding dropped from roughly eight per month to two. Took about six weeks.
This company distributes chilled and ambient food products to 340 independent retailers across south Wales. When they contacted us, their gross margin had fallen from 18 per cent to 13.5 per cent over two years despite a 12 per cent increase in revenue. The founder suspected driver costs were the issue.
Our diagnostic showed that driver costs were actually in line with industry norms. The real problem was product spoilage. The company was losing £8,200 per month in expired stock because their ordering system relied on manual spreadsheets that did not account for seasonal demand variation. A second issue was that two of their largest retail accounts had negotiated volume discounts three years earlier and nobody had revisited the terms since.
We helped the operations manager set up a demand-forecasting template linked to their point-of-sale data, which reduced spoilage by 61 per cent within eight weeks. We also supported the sales director in renegotiating the two volume-discount agreements, recovering approximately £47,000 in annual margin.
A 35-person software house was growing fast but struggling to deliver projects on time. Their average project overran the original estimate by 40 per cent. The CEO had tried hiring more developers, but delivery times did not improve.
We spent two weeks interviewing project managers, developers and the sales team. The root cause was not capacity. It was scope. The sales team was agreeing to feature lists during the sales process that the development team had never reviewed. By the time developers saw the requirements, the client already expected those features at the quoted price. Every project started with a gap between what was sold and what was feasible.
We introduced a pre-sale technical review: before any proposal goes to a client, a senior developer spends 90 minutes assessing feasibility and estimating effort. The sales team now includes that estimate in the proposal. In the six months after implementation, average project overrun dropped from 40 per cent to 11 per cent. Client satisfaction scores on their post-project survey rose from 6.8 to 8.4 out of 10.
These figures are drawn from our 73 completed engagements between 2018 and 2024.
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