Procurement by email, inventory in spreadsheets, contracts in a folder — the ops debt a fast-growing company accumulates, and how to work out what to fix first.
Nothing is on fire. That is what makes this one hard to act on.
But procurement happens over email and nobody can tell you what is committed. Inventory lives in a spreadsheet that one person maintains. Contracts are in a folder, and when someone asks which of them auto-renew next quarter, the answer takes two days. The month-end close has quietly grown from five days to nine and nobody decided that.
You have doubled headcount in eighteen months and the processes are the ones you had at half the size. They still work, in the sense that the company functions. They work by consuming people.
It gets framed as a system problem too early. Buying software is a satisfying decision because it feels like action. But a new system running an undiagnosed process is an expensive way to preserve the problem, and it consumes the year you needed.
Or it gets ignored because nothing is broken. Ops debt does not produce a crisis; it produces a tax. The tax is paid in the finance team's evenings and in decisions made a week later than they should have been. That is invisible right up until a diligence process or a launch turns it visible.
The wrong thing gets fixed first. Companies tend to fix the process that annoys the loudest person, not the one costing the most. Those are rarely the same process.
Operations. You know where the time actually goes, measured rather than estimated, and you fix in order of cost rather than in order of complaint.
Regulatory. The cleanup does not accidentally break something that carries regulatory weight — and equally, it does not gold-plate a process that carries none. Both happen.
Capital. The fixes move you toward the control environment you will need for whatever is next, rather than away from it. Most process cleanup is control work in disguise; done deliberately, you get both.
Global. Whatever you rebuild anticipates the second country, because rebuilding twice is the most avoidable cost in this whole category.
We look at where time and money are actually going across procurement, inventory, contracts, order-to-cash, and reporting. Not a survey — the documents, the transactions, and conversations with the people doing the work.
You get a prioritized list with effort and impact against each item, and an honest note about which ones are cheap and which only look cheap.
This is the classic process assessment: four to six weeks, fixed fee, the whole surface through four lenses, ending in a prioritized roadmap with quick wins identified.
If you want to start smaller, a targeted analysis takes one area — usually procurement or inventory — and answers it in days. We can have an NDA signed the day you ask.