HoursBack

HoursBack finds where working hours go, then builds the automations and agents that give them back. I work with owner-led businesses and larger organisations, and the method is the same: talk to the people doing the work.

In a smaller business that starts with an hour with the owner or a department head, mapping where the week actually goes: the reconciliation that eats every Friday, the report nobody wants to write, the handover that quietly costs a day. Then I write up what to fix, in what order, and what it is worth in hours.

In a larger organisation it runs as a fixed-term programme. Short, confidential interviews, role by role, show where each hour goes and what is repeated. Leadership gets one view of the hours that can be recovered and what to stop doing first. It is not a headcount review. The hours go back to the people already there.

In three recent assessments, each team was losing about 770 to 870 hours a year to repeated admin: 870 in an insurance broker's team, 780 in a recruitment team, and 770 across a specialist insurer's finance function. Close to half a working year, in one team. In two of them the first fixes are already built: a broker's specialist quotes now come from one row in a workbook, and a recruitment team's call notes go straight from the call into the CRM.

Where an agent earns its place, I build it in the client's own account, so they own it, and I support it for as long as they want. Not everyone needs an agent. Often what they need is a process nobody has written down.

Before this I spent twenty-two years in the creative industry, latterly automating marketing production for Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz and Betway.