Sales are up. So why does the business feel harder to run?
Growth breaks the back office first. More customers means more admin, more exceptions, more invoices and more decisions only you can make, and somewhere along the way the margin got thinner. This is the unglamorous half of the business, and it's where a lot of the money goes missing.
What we look at
- Process. How the five most important jobs actually get done, by whom, and where they stall.
- Owner dependency. The decisions, approvals and passwords that only one person holds.
- Margin. Profit by service, product or client, not just the total. Unbilled work, discounts, delivery costs that crept up.
- Pricing. When prices last moved, and whether they still cover what it costs to deliver.
- Cash. How fast invoices go out, how fast they're paid, and who chases the rest.
- Reporting. Whether you can see this month's numbers before next month is over.
What changes
Written process for the jobs that matter most, one page each. Rules for the decisions that come up every week, so they stop coming to you. Invoicing and chasing that happen on time without anyone having to remember. A monthly report in plain language: revenue, margin, cash, and the few numbers that actually move the business. The pricing conversation that's overdue. Where it makes sense, the manual steps go to automation and the customer records to a CRM, so the process doesn't depend on whoever happens to be in the office.
How involved we get
Most clients get this as part of the transformation engagement. Asteroid Management, the most involved of the three levels, adds business and financial management: forecasting, performance tracking, management reporting, and a second opinion on the decisions that deserve more than a spreadsheet and a guess.
Where you can see it
BRZH Real Estate in Doha runs on five connected modules: CRM, listings, documents, a staff app and an intranet, built so the team works from the system rather than from the owner's phone. For Professional Sports Group in Doha and Vitals Well in India, the work was the financial story: investor decks and plans that had to hold up in front of people who read numbers for a living. Details on the Work page.
Who it suits
Owners who are the busiest person in the business and the least sure where the profit went. Businesses where revenue is up and profit isn't, which is leak number four in why your business isn't growing. Teams that doubled in size on the same spreadsheets. Family businesses handing over to the next generation. If everything still runs through you, read the owner is the bottleneck, then start with the revenue leakage and operations audit. It was designed for exactly this.