8
audits detailed below, drawn from 31 client engagements
$2.18M/yr
operational waste quantified across these 8 audits
$1.58M/yr
projected annual value across the 4 audits with completed solution roadmaps
100%
of findings citation-backed to recorded client interviews
How these numbers are produced
Every audit maps the client's processes step by step from recorded working sessions. Waste items are calculated from hours the client themselves reported, priced at their actual wage or charge-out rates — never industry averages alone. Where a rate was unavailable, a conservative fallback is used and flagged. Verbatim quotes below are from audit session recordings, reproduced with identifying details removed.
Real Estate
Residential sales & property management group
100+ staff across 6 offices · 700–800 sales transactions/yr · 3,200 properties under management
$957,600/yr
quantified waste — the largest in our portfolio
What we found
- 2,987 appraisal contacts with no follow-up — plus a separate pool of 1,100 unfollowed sales opportunities
- The owner's own process analysis identified 382 steps per property sale, 19 hours of which are AI-replaceable — across 800 sales/yr that is 15,200 hours, worth $760,000/yr
- No call tracking on the sales side — agents use personal mobiles, while the property-management side already runs a tracked phone system with sentiment analysis
- 200+ ad-hoc automations with no central task board; no referral outcome reporting; marketing spend reconciled by humans reading invoices ($20,800/yr)
- Manual email template population, 4 people × 2.5 hrs/wk ($26,000/yr); role bleed between sales support and marketing ($52,000/yr); offshore QC rework ($26,000/yr)
"If it is 19 hours per property sale that we do, times by 800. It's massive."— Owner, doing the maths live on the audit call
Standout: the single largest finding — $760K/yr of AI-replaceable labour — came from the owner's own process map. The audit's job was to price it, sequence it, and connect it to the 2,987-lead follow-up gap nobody had quantified.
Youth Sports & Coaching
Youth sports coaching business
5–6 staff · ~600 active clients · $500–600K/yr revenue · founder rate $200/hr
$378,000/yr
quantified waste — 60–75% of revenue consumed by founder admin
What we found
- Founder manually reconciles payments against his bank feed — 15 hrs/wk = $156,000/yr ("Claire's the mum that is named CJ Bragg — how am I meant to know who that is?")
- Onboarding is a 3-hour-per-client manual process across Excel, WhatsApp, Wix and a class-management tool — 10 hrs/wk = $104,000/yr
- 50–60 children lost every term because re-enrolment lives entirely in the founder's memory — $66,000/yr in leaked revenue
- No bulk notification capability — cancelling a rained-out session means individually texting 20 families while coaching
- Browser-only class software requires full manual data entry where "every change cascades — it's a full domino effect" ($31,200/yr)
"Because I'm doing so much admin and it all is in my brain, I can't remember 600 cards."— Founder
Proposed roadmap — $436,800/yr projected value across 11 changes
| Change | Value / Build |
|---|
| Automated payment collection portal (kills the 15 hrs/wk reconciliation) | $156,000/yr · 2 wks |
| Centralised admin platform with role-based access | $156,000/yr · 4 wks |
| Automated re-enrolment & lead reactivation sequences | $66,000/yr · 2 wks |
| AI coach-feedback → personalised parent updates (the "personal touch" at scale) | $36,000/yr · 1.5 wks |
Standout: first-year toolkit cost $11,759 all-in — payback in well under a month of returned founder time.
Home Services / Placement
Boutique nanny placement agency
10 head-office staff · 300–400 families joining per year · 6-year-old SME · 27 tools in the stack
$252,760/yr
quantified waste + systemic revenue leakage
What we found
- 300–400 families join annually but only ~120 are ever invoiced for second instalments — compounded by families paying nannies cash directly ("It's very difficult to stop it")
- CRM is 100% manual — "we're dragging people through pipelines, manually adding tasks" — with the vendor quoting ~$25K/yr plus setup just for basic automation
- Recruitment for thousands of applicants runs in a Google Sheet — 15 hrs/wk × 2 people = $27,418/yr
- Monthly compliance checks typed by hand into a government website — $12,902/yr
- Name mismatches across four systems mean "often we're taking 10 minutes to find the contact"; six years of decisions made on gut feel with no financial dashboard
Proposed roadmap — $721,609/yr projected value across 33 changes
| Change | Value / Build |
|---|
| Automated role-fill acceleration pipeline (fill rate 55% → 65%) | $126,000/yr · 0.5 wks |
| Centralised business intelligence dashboard (replacing gut feel) | $57,500/yr · 1.5 wks |
| Automated family onboarding across 4 systems (22 hrs/wk returned) | $53,104/yr · 1.5 wks |
| Automated second-instalment tracking & invoicing | $52,603/yr · 0.5 wks |
Standout: the second-instalment automation alone recovers $47,923/yr of revenue already being earned but never invoiced — a half-week build that pays for the entire audit many times over.
Immigration / Professional Services
Immigration & visa services practice
8 staff across two cities · 30–40 concurrent visa applications
$208,000/yr
quantified waste — running entirely on spreadsheets and paper
What we found
- No operational software at all. "We're just using Excel sheets and the basic notepads" — an 8-person practice managing 30–40 live visa applications on spreadsheets and handwritten notes
- Staff re-request documents clients have already sent — "which is not giving a good impression to the clients" — manual document chasing costs $104,000/yr (5 hrs/wk × 8 staff)
- 2–3 weeks from engagement to visa lodgement, most of it chasing paperwork
- No automated client follow-up ($62,400/yr) and no visa-expiry tracking — no reminders as client visas approach their two-month renewal window
- No centralised visibility across active applications; Excel-based tracking costs a further $41,600/yr
"I just need something as soon as possible because the business is sensitive."— Practice owner
Standout: the entire $208K/yr leak traces to the absence of one thing — a system of record. The roadmap here is not exotic AI; it is digitising a paper practice in the right order.
Disability / NDIS Services
Disability support services provider
~50 staff across 4 entities · government-funded care sector
$120,000/yr
quantified waste + untracked funding overruns
What we found
- The operations lead personally builds tomorrow's staff schedule every single day, 7 days a week — "between three and five hours a day" — 28 hrs/wk = $58,240/yr of executive time
- Lead response time of 1.5 days in a sector with near-100% conversion — losing roughly one new participant per month
- Onboarding is paper folders → scan → re-enter into multiple systems; a kanban board serves as the participant database ("it's the only place I can see who is the mother of this person")
- Weekly payroll verification runs midnight-to-1am ($12,480/yr); staff learn their shifts late the night before
- Funding overruns sometimes run 6 weeks before anyone notices services are going unpaid; $6,000/yr still being paid for abandoned scheduling software
Proposed roadmap — $204,880/yr projected value across 17 changes, 9 weeks of implementation
| Change | Value / Build |
|---|
| CRM lead pipeline with instant response (recovers ~1 lost participant/mo) | $63,120/yr · 0.5 wks |
| Rules-based scheduling engine with voice input (21 hrs/wk returned) | $43,680/yr · 1 wk |
| AI-generated progress reports — the client's stated referral differentiator | $11,440/yr · 1 wk |
| Central participant database + single-source payroll verification | $20,800/yr · 2 wks |
Standout: the recommended toolkit costs $3,028/yr to run — but cancelling the abandoned $6,000/yr subscription makes the new stack $1,892/yr cheaper than what they pay today.
B2B Distribution / Field Sales
Dermatology products distributor (B2B)
8–9 staff · 4 field business development managers across 4 states
$104,000/yr
quantified waste — field team productivity
What we found
- $83,200/yr of field-rep time spent visiting accounts worth $5–7K/yr instead of prospecting — calendars filled with comfort visits by reps recruited for soft skills, not cold calling ("not known to be the types that kick doors down")
- 40 of 150 qualified leads from a market expansion were abandoned after a single voicemail — "they left a message, and that was basically the end of it"
- Account growth net flat for 2 years — ~40 new accounts gained per year, offset by churn ("treading water")
- Field reps refuse to log CRM activity — zero visibility on calls per day, visit frequency, or demo outcomes; the MD spent an entire weekend manually qualifying 150 leads himself
- Operations cross-references 4 disconnected systems (calendar ↔ GPS tracker ↔ accounting ↔ CRM) daily — confirmed "not working" — $13,000/yr
Standout: the roadmap centres on AI lead auto-qualification, a field-activity dashboard with prospecting alerts, and a 60-day no-order churn alert — turning an unmanaged field team into a measured one without forcing CRM data entry they've refused for years.
Marketing Agency
Marketing agency serving trade businesses
2 founders + 5 contractors · clients are $10–20M quote-driven trade businesses · $14K/mo retainers
$92,560/yr
quantified waste — and a hard ceiling on growth
What we found
- Founder bottleneck caps the agency at 1–2 concurrent client onboardings — each needs a 6–8 week intensive discovery led personally by the founders
- Process mapping takes 2 days of manual write-up after each site visit; a 60-page market intelligence report takes "three or four days to really read" and goes underused
- Monthly reporting hand-consolidated from 5 specialist reports ($7,500/yr); one founder personally answers every client's Facebook Messenger daily ($10,920/yr)
- Part-time scheduling overlap creates duplicated coordination 3 of 5 weekdays ($7,800/yr); QA suffers whenever the founders get busy; no per-client profitability visibility
"What I would like to try to do is get to a place where the retainer part could actually drop off a cliff and get to an operating cost that might sit somewhere between the $5,000 to the $10,000."— Founder, on cutting their own ongoing delivery cost by 50–75% through automation
Proposed roadmap — $220,360/yr projected value across 30 changes
| Change | Value |
|---|
| AI-assisted discovery from call transcripts with standardised templates | $34,840/yr |
| Client-facing portal with real-time status | $7,800/yr |
| Automated monthly reporting consolidation | $7,500/yr |
| Auto-generated campaign messaging from market intelligence reports | $6,800/yr |
Standout: the audit reframed automation from a cost saving into a capacity unlock — the roadmap supports scaling from 7 to 14 people and from 5 clients to the stated target of 12 per year.
Construction / Manufacturing
Steel manufacturing & construction business
38 staff including a 13-person construction team · enterprise-tier software stack
$67,600/yr
quantified waste — plus uncounted double-paid invoices
What we found
- Zero data movement between the three core systems (CRM, project management, ERP) — every project manually created in all three; the dedicated person left and the work fell to a manager ($31,200/yr)
- Double-paid invoices — the expense tool doesn't cross-check against the vendor ledger
- GL-to-project-ledger reconciliation runs in Excel before work-in-progress calculations can even begin ($10,400/yr)
- Proposal creation lags behind director expectations — 5 hrs/wk × 2 people ($26,000/yr)
- A previous ERP go-live disaster cost 7 months of recovery from data corruption — "it nearly broke my systems person" — paying enterprise prices at mid-market utilisation
"We don't have any connectivity… We're not moving any data yet. That's our problem."— Systems lead
Standout: a textbook integrate-around-the-stack case. Nothing gets replaced — the roadmap automates project creation across the three systems, kills the Excel reconciliation step, and adds AI-native accounts-payable checking to stop double payments.
Want the full detail behind any of these?
Each audit above is backed by a complete process map, citation-indexed findings, waste calculations and a priority-ranked implementation roadmap. Client references and verifiable documentation are available on request — video testimonials are currently being collected as engagements complete.
apgsoftware.com · adam@apgsoftware.com