The three biggest challenges

"What are your three biggest challenges right now? The ones where fixing them would change the most."

Which one hurts most, and what fixing it is worth

"Of those three, which one is costing you the most? How long has it been like that? And if it were fixed tomorrow, what actually changes, in numbers?"

Rough is fine. A guess beats a blank. "About £40k a year" or "maybe 5 hours a week" tells us far more than "a lot". Answer whichever of these apply:

• Time saved: whose hours does it give back, and roughly how many a week?
• What those hours cost: roughly what does an hour of that person's time cost?
• Revenue won: if it's about winning work rather than saving time, how many more jobs a year would you win, and what's an average one worth?
• The tell: what single number would tell you it had worked?

The repetitive work

"Where's the repetitive work, the same thing coming round again and again? Think about a typical week, or one piece of work from start to finish."

For the two or three that eat the most time, tell us which role they fall to, how often they come round, and roughly how long they take. And what does the work involve? Reading and typing things up, chasing things along, checking things are right, deciding what happens next.

The bottlenecks

"And where are the bottlenecks? What holds things up: an approval, a system, a handover, waiting on someone else? And where do mistakes tend to creep in?"

The whole picture

"How does work actually move through the business, from a lead landing to a job finished and a customer coming back? Tell us where it runs well, and where it drags."

Tell us as much of it as you see. This is the most useful answer on the form, so it's worth more time than the others.

One of those, step by step

"Now pick the one part of that which causes the most grief, and take us through it properly. Step by step, as it actually happens on a normal week, starting from the moment it lands on someone's desk."

Go slower here than feels necessary. Anything that sounds like one step usually isn't: "check it", "approve it", "sign it off" are each a handful of decisions somebody makes from memory. Tell us who decides, and what makes it go one way rather than the other. This is where the useful answers hide.

The numbers, and where they live

"Which numbers actually tell you how things are going? And where do they come from: a system, a spreadsheet, someone's head? How much work is it to pull them together?"

If you don't really track any, say that too. It's just as useful to know.

The tools you work in day to day

"What do you actually work in each day? CRM, accounting, project management, email and chat, plus anything else you'd struggle without."

What you've tried, and what you'd like to

"Is anything already being used? ChatGPT, Copilot, something built into a tool you pay for. Has anything been tried and quietly dropped? And is there something you'd like to do with AI but haven't worked out how?"

"Nothing yet" is a perfectly good answer. Worth telling us how people around you feel about it too: keen, wary, somewhere in between.

If you change nothing

"Say nothing changes. Same systems, same way of working, same team. Where does that leave you in 6 to 12 months?"

The perfect fix

"Last one. If a magic wand could build the perfect fix for everything above, what would it look like? Don't worry about how. Just describe the outcome you'd want."