Operations & automation — Limerick
He got twenty hours a month back. He opened a fifth restaurant.
Keel GRP takes the work nobody enjoys off your team, so they can get on with the work that grows the business.
No pitch. We look at where the time actually goes.
Nobody lost a job. The part of the work people actually wanted to do just got bigger.
This is not about cutting staff
The knowledge in your team is the asset. The typing is not.
It is the first thing most owners think when somebody mentions automation, so it is worth answering plainly.
The value in your team is the years they have spent learning how your business actually works. None of that is in the invoice scanning, or the inbox tidying, or the interest forms nobody wants to read. Those are the jobs that get done badly at nine at night because there was no time for them at eleven in the morning.
Take those away and you have not reduced anybody. You have a person with ten years of hard-won knowledge finally spending their week on the part of the job that needed it. In a market where holding onto good people is the hardest thing a small business does, that matters more than the hours saved.
Same team. Considerably more coming out the other end.
What usually turns out to be the problem
Four patterns turn up in almost every business we look at.
Every business is different, which is why the first thing we do is look rather than sell. But some things come up again and again.
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01
Somebody is the bridge between two systems
Reading numbers off one screen and typing them into another. Invoices into the accounts package, orders into a spreadsheet, figures from the till into a report. If a person is the connection between two bits of software, that connection can usually be built properly.
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02
The inbox eats an hour a day
Sorting what matters from what does not, forwarding things to the right person, answering the same five questions. It never appears on anyone's job description and it never stops.
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03
Enquiries get read late or not at all
Forms and emails from people who want to buy something, sitting unopened because the day got away. The expensive part is not the admin, it is the work that quietly went elsewhere.
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04
Knowing how the month went takes a day
Pulling figures out of four places to answer a question the business should be able to answer on a Tuesday morning.
Put a rough number on it
Three inputs. One honest number.
Think of one manual job in your business — the invoices, the inbox, the weekly report. Three rough answers and you can see what it costs in a year.
a year, roughly, in paid time going into that one job
That is the size of the thing worth looking at — not what we would save you. Whether any of it is recoverable, and how, depends entirely on what is underneath it in your business. Sometimes the answer is a small fix. Sometimes, honestly, it is to leave it alone. That is what the free half hour is for.
Why us
Someone who can read your accounts and build the fix.
Most people offering this are one of two things. Business people who understand the problem but cannot build the answer, or technical people who can build anything but have never read a set of accounts.
Keel GRP is led by Gareth Morrissey, who has both: four years in Strategy and Operations at Google, an Executive MBA from the University of Limerick, and a client whose bookkeeping, VAT returns and payroll he runs himself at the moment.
That last part is the important one. This is not advice from the outside. It is someone who has been inside the paperwork of a real Irish business this month, and who can read your accounts and build the fix.
How it works
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A free half hour
You describe where the week goes. We work out together whether there is anything here worth doing. Sometimes there is not, and that is a useful thing to find out over a coffee rather than three months in.
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We come in and look properly
A short piece of paid work mapping where the time and money actually go, scored by what is recoverable against what is realistic. You get a written shortlist, and it is yours whether you go further or not.
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We build it
Fixed price, agreed before anything starts, built around the tools already in the business. No migration project and nothing new for the team to learn on top of the day job.
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We keep it running
Things drift. Suppliers change their formats, businesses add sites. We stay on hand monthly, fix what breaks, and flag the next thing worth doing when it appears.
Worth half an hour?
If somebody in your business is spending their week on work they cannot stand, the call costs nothing and you will leave it knowing whether there is anything in this for you.
Or email gareth@keelgrp.com directly.