There's a particular kind of work that keeps showing up in the businesses we visit. It doesn't appear on the org chart, and it isn't anyone's Friday stand-up. But everyone knows where to look when it goes wrong.
The finance lead re-keying invoices from a supplier portal into a spreadsheet every Thursday afternoon. The ops manager copying case notes between two systems that don't speak to each other. The office manager who knows, in their bones, that if their most trusted colleague took a two-week holiday, something would quietly fall over.
We started Provect because we kept meeting the same person, in business after business. Not the founder. Not the sales lead. The one who was holding it all together by hand.
#What the problem actually looks like
Most of the businesses we work with aren't broken. They're growing. They've outgrown the setup that got them this far, but the work to fix it has never quite made it to the top of the list.
What you see instead is:
- A handful of systems that each do one job, with a person bridging the gap between them.
- Spreadsheets that have quietly become the source of truth for something important.
- One or two people who own a process in their head, in their inbox, and in the gaps between tools.
- A general sense that things work, as long as nobody important is off.
None of that is dramatic. All of it is real, and most of it adds up to a working week spent on work nobody is paid to think about.
#Why the work doesn't get done
The work is too small to be a project and too important to ignore. It lives in the seams between tools, and the people closest to it are the busiest people in the building.
A few things we've heard, in various forms, in almost every first conversation:
"We know it costs us a day a week. We've known for two years."
"We've asked about automating it before. The quote was bigger than the problem."
"It works. We just don't love it."
That last one is, more often than not, the honest answer. The work is being done. It's just being done by the wrong person, on the wrong day, in the wrong tool. And because it works, it stays where it is.
#What we do about it
Provect exists to look at that work properly. To name it, cost it, and automate the parts that aren't anyone's actual job.
We don't start with a transformation. We start with the work someone does every Thursday, and we work out what's worth automating, what's worth tidying up, and what's fine as it is. Sometimes the answer is "leave it alone", and we say so.
What we won't do is sell you a system. We're small, we ship, and we tell you what something will cost before we start. The businesses we work best with are the ones who have a sense that something is being held together by hand, and would like that to change.
#If this sounds familiar
Think about your week. Is there a job that quietly props everything else up? A person who, if they stepped back for a month, would leave a hole you can't quite describe but would absolutely feel?
If so, we'd like to hear about it. Not to sell you anything. Just to put a shape on it, and probably a number on it. Most of the work we do starts with a conversation that lasts about half an hour and ends with a clearer picture of where the time goes.
The person holding it together by hand is doing important work. They just shouldn't be doing it on their own.
Recognise any of this in your own business? Tell us about it and we’ll say whether it’s worth automating.
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