Client onboarding
Welcome sequences, contracts, access setup, briefing collection. All triggered when a project is confirmed, rather than assembled by hand each time.
Founders and small teams
Your small team needs room
to do its best work.
10PM helps founders and small teams simplify repetitive administration before deciding whether to hire. We look at onboarding, billing, reporting and duplicated entry, then check which changes can create useful capacity.
At a glance
- Who it fits
- Founder-led teams of two to five, with no dedicated admin person
- The question
- Hire, or remove the work first
- Where it starts
- The Time Leak Audit, from £950
- Your time
- Under two hours
The problem
Before you hire,
ask what should not exist.
Founder-led teams of two to five hit a familiar ceiling: too much work, not enough people. The instinct is to hire. Before adding anyone, it is worth asking which of that work should not be done by a person at all.
The tasks that repeat with every client and every month are the ones worth looking at: onboarding, invoicing, status updates, reporting, moving the same data between two systems. None of it needs your team’s judgement. It needs consistency and speed, which a system does better than a person does.
The Audit identifies what is genuinely worth automating, what the current situation costs you in a year, and whether building anything makes financial sense before you commit to it.
The useful question is how much repeatable work your team can remove, and what they would do with the released time. The Audit starts with your actual tasks, rather than a promised team-size multiplier.
Where the time goes
Where small teams lose
the most capacity
The highest impact fixes tend to be the ones that touch every client, every cycle.
Common candidates in a small team
- Client onboarding triggered by a signed contract
- Monthly and weekly reporting drafts
- Invoice generation and payment follow-up
- Project status drafts prepared on schedule for a person to send
- Records kept in step across two systems
- New enquiry intake and routing
- Alerts when something is overdue, rather than daily checks
- A weekly digest so nobody has to ask where things stand
The arithmetic
What the numbers look like
The compounding matters more for a team than for one person. If two people each spend four hours a week on work a system could do, that is around 400 hours a year across the team, assuming a fifty-week year.
At a blended internal rate of £150 an hour, those 400 hours represent around £60,000 of capacity. Your own rate and your own hours give your own number, and the Audit works it out with you rather than assuming it.
The point is not the headline figure. It is that the same fix removes the problem for everyone at once, which is what makes it different from hiring.
≈12 → <1hours of admin in a busy month, at a payroll firm serving around 200 client companies
Premium Paye
At Premium Paye in France, invoice preparation, direct debits and online onboarding were connected. The founder reports around twelve hours of admin in a busy month with new clients before the change, and under one hour now across those processes.
Read the case studyEvery daythe founder reads the activity instead of assembling it
Recruitment agency, London
Activity lived across spreadsheets, email and notes. It was all recorded and none of it could be used to decide anything. Reporting built backwards from the founder’s own questions changed that.
Read the case studyHow it works
Three paid phases.
You decide after each one.
Each phase has its own deliverables and its own fixed fee, so you always know what you are buying before you buy the next thing.
Time Leak Audit
I map how the work happens today, estimate the hours that could be recovered and rank the opportunities against your goals. Under two hours of your time.
From £950 · fixed feeProcess Design
A working session with your team, then detailed mapping: the steps, the data, the business rules and the exceptions that decide how the build behaves.
Separately scoped · fixed feeImplementation and handover
I build it in the tools you already use, test it against the agreed scenarios, document it and show your team how to run it without me.
Fixed project price · quoted after Process DesignBefore any of it, a free fifteen-minute conversation. Bring the process as it actually happens, not as it should.
Before we talk
What founders ask
before starting.
Many of these come up in the free fifteen minutes, before anyone has spent anything.
Should we hire instead?
Sometimes, yes. If the bottleneck is bespoke work that genuinely needs a person’s judgement, hire. If it is the weight of predictable admin sitting underneath the real work, removing the work first is often cheaper and faster.
The Audit is designed to answer that question with your numbers rather than a rule of thumb.
Do we have to change tools?
I start with the tools you already use. Some workflows can use built-in features; others need a connector or an API-based service. We check access, usage limits, data handling and recurring costs before choosing the setup. You own the accounts, and the proposal identifies the subscriptions and support the agreed workflow needs.
We are only three people. Is that too small?
No. Small teams often see the clearest result, because one person often carries most of the admin and removing it changes their week immediately.
What if the answer is that nothing is worth automating?
Then you will hear that in the report, and you will have spent the price of the Audit rather than the price of a build.
Keep reading
Related
Your business
Create capacity
without hiring.
Tell me how your team spends its week. I will tell you whether removing work can create the capacity you need, or whether hiring is the better answer.
15 minutes · No charge
Prefer to write? [email protected]