The Review
Three to five pages. Never more. An owner reads the first paragraph and the last and skims what sits between them, so the conclusion goes at the top rather than the end. Here is every section, what each one is for, and the kind of sentence it contains.
These illustrate the format. They are not a client engagement. The quoted sentences show the register a Review is written in and the shape of its arithmetic. They describe an invented file at an invented business. We have not published anyone's Review and we will not — what a client writes to us stays between us.
Three or four sentences and no more. What we looked at, the single biggest thing we found, and whether it is worth acting on. If the owner reads nothing else, this paragraph has to leave them knowing what we concluded.
It gets written last, after the rest of the document has told us what it thinks.
The register
We reviewed how a file moves from the day the request arrives to the day it goes back out. The work itself takes about four hours. The elapsed time averages nineteen days, and most of that is spent waiting on documents from the client. Two changes would close most of that gap, and neither requires new software.
The workflow described back to you in your own words wherever possible. If you wrote that something becomes a fire drill, we use that phrase. Nothing establishes that the reading was real faster than seeing your own sentence returned with a number attached to it.
This section does two jobs. It proves the attention was real, and it gives you the chance to correct us before we build a recommendation on a misunderstanding. It describes what happens, not what is supposed to happen — including the steps that only work because one particular person remembers to do them.
The register
The request is logged the day it arrives. From there it sits in the shared inbox until someone opens it, which you described as depending on how busy that week is.
Nobody owns the file between the point the document request goes out and the point it comes back. You told us this is where files go quiet.
The section that earns the fee. Every minute is sorted into three kinds and named plainly: time spent working, time spent on things that have to happen but create nothing, and time spent waiting.
Waiting is the one you cannot see from the inside, because it never lands on anyone's desk as their problem. A file that sat eleven days waiting on one document cost the business eleven days, and nobody in the building experienced those days as theirs.
One number, and it has to be checkable — something you can verify from memory while reading. Not a cost model, not annualised savings, not a loaded labour rate.
The register
This step takes about twenty minutes and happens roughly forty times a month. That is thirteen hours a month, or around a hundred and sixty hours a year.
The work in this file takes four hours. The file takes nineteen days. The difference is not effort — it is waiting, and nobody in the business currently owns it.
Two or three things, ordered: first, then, later. Never a list of ten — that is a list nobody acts on, and it signals we could not decide what mattered.
Each one carries what to change, why it helps, and what it costs your team in effort. Specific enough that you could begin on Monday without calling us. Nothing we recommend requires us to be there. Where AI is part of a recommendation, the human check is named in the same breath rather than assumed.
The register
First, send the document request the day the file is logged rather than when it is next opened. On the volumes you described, this alone recovers most of the nineteen days.
Then, replace the generic document list with one built from the request type. Someone on your team already rewrites it by hand each time; this is that work, done once.
A drafting assistant can produce the first version from the facts already on the file. A person reviews and rewrites before anything leaves the business — that gate is not optional.
Never skipped. It is the shortest section in the document and it does more for credibility than anything else in it.
Telling an owner which parts of their business we would not touch proves we understand it is not a factory. It also answers the fear most people arrive with, which is that someone is about to automate their judgment.
The register
We would not touch the first conversation with a client. The value in it is your reading of them, and nothing we could build would improve that.
The final check before anything goes out stays exactly as it is. It is the last place a person catches what a template cannot.
The honesty section. It says plainly what the intake did not tell us and what it would take to find out. A document that admits its own limits earns more trust than one that does not, not less.
The register
We could not tell from the intake how long a file typically sits in review. Your system records stage changes; a single export would answer it.
We have assumed the volumes you gave us are typical. If that month was unusual, the arithmetic above shifts and we would want to redo it.
Two or three sentences. What happens next if you want to go further, and — said plainly — that you are under no obligation to.
The register
If the first change is worth making, your team can put it in place without us. If you would rather we designed it properly, that is a separate engagement and we would be glad to. Either way, this review is complete and nothing further is owed.
The test
If a number cannot be checked without a spreadsheet, it does not go in the document.
An indefensible figure costs more than no figure at all — and it is the first thing anyone who has ever been accountable for a number will test.
So the arithmetic is deliberately simple: this step takes roughly this long, it happens roughly this often, so it costs roughly this much a year. Approximate and honest beats precise and unverifiable. Where we cannot defend a number, the Review says so instead of printing it.
Start
Everything above is built from one written intake. Read the questions first — all thirty-one are published — and decide whether they are the right ones for your business.
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