Your best people can do their best work
Most of what your team does every day is not what makes you different from your competitors. We make that part run predictably and mostly on its own, using the tools you already pay for, so your budget and your best people go where the business actually wins.
The 20% that differentiates you
Your product, your pricing, your client judgment. We do not touch this.
Fund this ↑ · Stop paying twice for this ↓
The 80% every company runs the same way
Standardised, documented, and largely handled without you.
Every business thinks it's different.
Most of what it does isn't.
And you are right about the part that counts. Your product, your customers, the calls only your team can make: that is your advantage, and it deserves your best people and your budget. The rest of the working day is the same in every company your size. It is also where the money quietly leaks.
Differentiating
The reason a client picks you instead of the other supplier. Custom by nature. Never standardise it.
- What you actually sell, and how well you deliver it
- Pricing, positioning and the deals worth chasing
- Relationships and the trust behind them
- The judgment calls that carry real consequences
Non-differentiating
Necessary, invisible to your customer, and identical across your industry. Nobody ever won a deal here, but plenty of margin is lost here.
- Finance admin: quotes, invoices, chasing, reconciliation
- Sourcing and procurement approvals
- Quality checks, audit trails, compliance evidence
- Onboarding, handovers, status reporting, internal questions
You move fast because you trust the system.
One source of truth. Every scenario written down, including the awkward ones. Execution becomes predictable, and predictable is what makes speed safe.No new platform
Large enterprises fix this with an ERP and a small army of consultants. You do not need one. We build on Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Notion and Atlassian: what you already own.
No custom sprawl
The standard way of doing a standard process is usually good enough. Every bespoke exception you invent is something you maintain forever. We keep the core clean on purpose.
Your team stays owner
Everything is handed over documented and maintainable by the people who use it. No dependency on us, and no black boxes nobody dares to touch.
Does this sound like your week?
Select what applies. These are the symptoms of a business paying twice for work that should be invisible.
Nothing here asks you to buy a platform
SAP consultants build this on SAP. We build the same thinking on the tools you already run your company on.
And your ERP, if you have one.
Diagnose. Document. Deploy.
In that order, and never out of it. Automating an undocumented process just makes a bad process faster, and much harder to unpick later.
What the work actually delivers
Regulated-industry quality assurance methodology applied to real client operations. Measured before, measured after.
Student administrative services
Every case tracked across scattered spreadsheets and email threads. Students constantly asking where their file stood, with no way to answer. No standard process, so quality varied case by case, and nobody new could be brought in without months of shadowing.
| Point | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Cases per consultant | 15/mo | 21/mo |
| Onboarding time | 2–3 mo | 3 wk |
| Client visibility | None | Real time |
E-commerce auto parts retailer
A business that grew faster than its internal infrastructure. Orders arriving quicker than the team could process them by hand, across four separate platforms with no unified system behind them.
| Point | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Manual work | 100% | 20% |
| Error rate | 30% | <1% |
| Founder hours in ops | 25h/wk | <5h/wk |
Post-market surveillance, QA
A compliance-critical workflow governed by FDA, EU MDR and ISO 13485 at once, executed manually from end to end. Safety notices sent as attachments, acknowledgements tracked by hand, follow-up reminders set one at a time. One specialist held the entire process.
| Point | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Manual work | 90% | 10% |
| Error rate | 30% | <2% |
| Onboarding time | 2 mo | 2 wk |
Benchmark across engagements
What the audits actually found: €98,000 in a one-person compliance team, €233,000 in a four-person business — €133,000 of operational waste and €100,000 of revenue never earned. The figure scales with the size of the operation, not the size of the invoice.
“We were growing fast but our operations were held together with duct tape. OpsFirst didn’t just build automations — they taught us how to think about operations systematically. Now we can scale without everything breaking.”
Founder, auto parts e-commerceThree entry points. One direction.
Each tier builds on the one before it. Start where you actually are, not where a proposal says you should be.
Diagnose
You know something is leaking, but not where or how much. Nothing gets fixed until that is on paper.
- Process audit interviews with founder and key operators
- Visual workflow mapping of how work really flows today
- Bottleneck, risk and key-person dependency analysis
- Waste quantified in hours and euros, not adjectives
- Prioritised roadmap: quick wins vs structural fixes
Document
You know what is broken. Now it needs to exist outside people's heads, in a form your team maintains.
- Everything in Foundation, plus:
- SOPs for every critical workflow, including the exceptions
- RACI: who owns it, who approves it, who executes it
- Decision rules: what to do when reality does not match the plan
- KPI structure and dashboards fed by the process itself
- A documentation architecture your team can keep alive
Deploy
Processes documented, workflows consistent, data trustworthy. Now the busywork can go.
- Deterministic automations built and deployed
- Bounded AI agents for the judgment-shaped work
- System integrations across your existing stack
- Live dashboards, monitoring and a troubleshooting guide
- Staff training, full handover, optional ongoing maintenance
Keep it true
Documented processes decay. People find workarounds, tools change, someone leaves. The drift is invisible until it costs something.
Available after Document or Deploy. There has to be a system before it is worth keeping true.
- Monthly health check: every process rated red, amber or green
- Quarterly drift report and review call
- Automation monitoring and minor adjustments
- 48-hour response
- Everything in Assurance
- Monthly strategy call and proactive optimisation
- New small automations within scope
- 24-hour response
- Everything in Governance
- Bi-weekly governance call and roadmap ownership
- Architecture advisory across departments
- Priority response, same or next business day
Three-month minimum, then rolling quarterly. Thirty days' notice before the next billing date. Scoped by number of processes covered, not by hours on a clock.
Or you could hire someone
It is the obvious comparison, so here is the honest version of it.
You are not replacing an employee. You are replacing the need to hire one.
And there is one thing a full-time hire structurally cannot do: audit their own work. Independence is the entire point of an audit function, and it is why this role sits outside the company rather than inside it.
Five things that have to be true first
Automating an undocumented process does not remove the chaos. It makes it faster and harder to see. If two or more of these are missing, we will not build automations for you. We will tell you what to fix first.
Most agencies will take the automation budget regardless. We would rather lose the project than hand you chaos at machine speed, because that is the version nobody can unpick afterwards.
If you fail the check, the honest answer is Foundation or Scale first. It costs less, it takes less time, and it is the only way the automation is worth building.
Take the 2-minute checkWhen we are the wrong call
Saying this up front saves us both a meeting. If you recognise yourself below, keep our details and come back when it changes.
Why I built OpsFirst
I built my foundation in operational excellence at Philips, a highly regulated multinational, working in Quality Assurance. That experience revealed one thing clearly: the difference between a company that scales and one that struggles is rarely talent or budget. It is structure.
In regulated environments, processes are not optional paperwork. Every scenario is written down, every deviation has a defined response, and execution is predictable because the system is trusted. That is not bureaucracy. It is what lets a large organisation move quickly without breaking.
Large enterprises get there by buying an ERP and keeping its core clean, so their money goes into what actually differentiates them. Growing companies deserve the same logic without the licence fee, the migration, or the eighteen-month programme. That is the whole idea behind OpsFirst.
A French employee costs 61 400 € a year.
Around 40% of their time goes on manual work.
That is the average, before anything specific to you. Replace the averages with your own numbers and the total updates as you type — salary, time on manual tasks, error rate, cost of an error. It will also tell you plainly if the amount does not justify a conversation.
INSEE, private sector, full-time equivalent, 2024 data published October 2025. Employer contributions range from 25% to 42% of gross depending on the profile; 42% is the realistic rate above 1.6× minimum wage.
The risk sits on our side
Three commitments that make the first step easy to take.
What we don't guarantee: results if the systems are never used. We guarantee our work, not your execution.
Ops health diagnostic
15 steps · 4 minutes · your result on screen straight away
The questions people actually ask
What exactly does OpsFirst do?+
We take the part of your business that does not differentiate you (quote to cash, source to pay, hire to onboard, issue to resolution, plan to report) and make it run predictably and mostly on its own. Three phases: Diagnose (find and price the leaks), Document (one source of truth your team maintains), Deploy (automations, bounded AI agents, dashboards). We don't only advise: we build it with you and hand it over documented.
Isn't this just automation consulting?+
Automation is the last step, not the offer. Automating an undocumented process makes a bad process faster and much harder to unpick. The value is in deciding what should not exist at all, standardising what remains, and only then removing the manual effort. That order is the difference between an AI project that pays back and one that quietly gets switched off.
What is Internal GPT, in one paragraph?+
A private AI assistant trained on your documented processes, with governance rules per role, so an employee can ask "what do I do when a delivery arrives short?" and get your company's actual answer, with a link to the procedure it came from, instead of interrupting a colleague. It is comparable in intent to SAP's Joule, built on the tools you already use. It is in development, and it only works on top of real documentation.
Do we have to replace our tools or buy a platform?+
No. Everything runs on your existing stack: Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, Slack, Notion, Atlassian, your CRM, your ERP if you have one. No migration, no new licence, no lock-in to me.
Who is this for? Do I need to be a large company?+
Built for growing B2B companies between 5 and 100 people: the stage where things break because processes never scaled with the team. If you are firefighting daily, key-person dependent, or struggling to delegate, you are the right fit regardless of industry.
Will AI agents make decisions for us?+
No. Agents handle the work between decisions: reading messy inputs, drafting, reconciling, chasing follow-ups. Anything with real consequence (money out, a commitment to a client, a compliance sign-off) stops at a human approval step. Humans always remain in the loop, by design and not as a marketing line.
How long does an engagement take?+
The Foundation audit takes 2 to 4 intensive days. The Scale package takes 5 to 10 days. Automation projects are scoped individually and typically run 2 to 6 weeks. Every engagement includes 30 days of post-delivery support.
What if you don't find 10× the investment in waste?+
Full refund: that is the Foundation guarantee. The bar scales with the engagement, so a €2,900 audit has to surface at least €29,000 of annual waste. In practice the two quantified audits found €98,000 and €233,000 a year: manual hours that could be automated, errors that cause rework, and revenue lost to slow or missed work.
Do I need my processes documented before we start?+
No, and that is usually the reason to call. Most clients arrive with zero formal documentation. We interview your team, map the workflows as they genuinely happen today (not as the org chart imagines them), and build the documentation from there.
I'm not sure where to start.+
Take the free operations diagnostic: 12 questions, 3 minutes, and you see where you stand right away \u2014 no email required. Or book a free 30-minute call and we will work it out together, with no obligation.
Let's find out what your operations
are costing you.
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch deck. We look at how your work actually flows and whether there is something worth fixing.