Unedited quotes shared with permission.
We brought ConsultSphere in because our margins had been shrinking for three consecutive quarters and we could not figure out why. Within two weeks they traced it to a supplier contract we had auto-renewed without renegotiating. That single finding saved us £74,000 a year. The rest of their recommendations were just as specific.
I was sceptical about consultants. The last firm we used produced a 90-page report that nobody read. ConsultSphere gave us 18 pages with five clear actions ranked by payoff. We implemented three of them ourselves and called them back for the other two. Turnover grew 22% that year.
The retainer arrangement works well for us. Having someone outside the business review our numbers every month catches things we are too close to see. Last quarter they flagged that one product line was actually losing money once we allocated overheads properly. We discontinued it and redeployed the staff. Profit went up, stress went down.
We needed to open a warehouse in the Midlands but had no experience outside Scotland. ConsultSphere researched locations, modelled the costs and helped us negotiate the lease. We were operational within four months. I would not have attempted it without their support.
Two projects in detail, with permission from the clients involved.
Highland Fresh Foods is a family-owned chilled-food manufacturer near Inverness employing 45 people. Revenue had grown steadily to £3.8m, but net profit had been falling for three quarters. The owner, Fiona Greig, asked us to find out where the money was going.
During our two-day diagnostic we rebuilt the company's cost allocation from scratch. The existing accounts lumped packaging, transport and raw materials into a single "cost of goods" line. When we separated them, a pattern appeared: packaging costs had risen 31% in 18 months because a supplier contract had auto-renewed at higher rates without anyone noticing.
We helped Fiona renegotiate that contract and tender two alternative suppliers. The winning bid came in £74,000 below the old rate on an annual basis. We also identified that one of six product lines carried a negative gross margin once delivery costs were properly allocated. Fiona chose to raise its price by 12% rather than drop it, and volume held steady.
Clyde Fulfilment is an e-commerce logistics company based in Glasgow. They pick, pack and ship orders for around 30 online retailers. When Tom Renwick contacted us, average dispatch time was 48 hours from order receipt. Several of their retail clients were threatening to leave for competitors who offered same-day dispatch.
We spent two days on the warehouse floor, timing each step of the pick-pack-ship process. The bottleneck was not in picking or packing: it was in the way orders were batched. The warehouse management system released orders in large batches twice a day, at 8 am and 2 pm. Pickers waited for the batch, then rushed to complete it. Half the orders placed between 9 am and 1 pm sat untouched until the afternoon batch.
We reconfigured the system to release orders in rolling micro-batches every 30 minutes. That required a settings change, not new software. We also rearranged the top 50 SKUs so the fastest-moving items sat closest to the packing stations, cutting average pick time by 40 seconds per order.
Within three weeks of implementation, 94% of orders placed before 2 pm were dispatched the same day. Tom retained all 30 clients and signed two new ones within the following quarter.
Our 143 completed projects span a range of industries. Here are the ones where we have the deepest experience.
Cost analysis, supplier renegotiation, production scheduling. 28 projects completed since 2018.
Pricing strategy, utilisation tracking, partnership structuring. Clients include law firms, accountancy practices and recruitment agencies.
Warehouse layout, dispatch optimisation, returns management. We have worked with fulfilment houses handling up to 8,000 orders per day.
Job costing accuracy, subcontractor management, cash-flow forecasting for project-based businesses with £1m to £15m turnover.
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