Unedited quotes collected at the end of each engagement. We include the client name and role with their consent.
We brought Reliable Biz Strategies in to help us figure out why our margins had been shrinking for three consecutive quarters. Within the first two weeks they identified £140k in annual procurement savings we had completely missed. The consultant assigned to us, Fiona, was in our office four days a week and knew our numbers better than most of our own managers by week three.
I was sceptical about hiring consultants. We are a 30-person joinery business and I assumed consulting was something only big firms did. The team showed me a 90-day plan on day one, priced it as a fixed fee, and delivered ahead of schedule. Our order-to-delivery time dropped from 14 days to 9. That alone won us two large contracts we would have lost on lead time.
The leadership coaching programme was genuinely useful. My senior team had been with me for years but we had never done structured feedback before. Some of the conversations were uncomfortable, but the facilitator handled them well. Three of my four managers now run their own weekly reviews without being asked, which saves me about six hours a week.
We needed to enter the Republic of Ireland market but had no contacts and no idea about the regulatory differences. Reliable Biz Strategies built us a market-sizing model, introduced us to two distribution partners and helped us negotiate the first contract. We went from zero Irish revenue to £320k in 11 months. I would not have attempted it without them.
Our warehouse was a mess. Orders shipped late, stock counts never matched the system, and we were losing customers. The process redesign took eight weeks. They mapped every step, retrained the team and set up a simple daily dashboard. Late shipments dropped from 18 per cent to under 3 per cent within two months of go-live.
The cost analysis was thorough but took a little longer than quoted because our own records were in poor shape. Fair play to the team though: they stuck to the fixed fee even after spending extra time cleaning our data. The final report gave us a prioritised list of 22 actions. We have completed 15 so far and saved roughly £87k annually.
Longer stories from three recent engagements, with permission from the clients involved.
Apex had strong products but sold only within Northern Ireland. The founder wanted to enter the Republic of Ireland but lacked the contacts and regulatory knowledge to do it alone.
We spent two weeks researching the Irish speciality food market, identified 14 potential distribution partners and shortlisted three based on category fit and credit history. Our consultant accompanied the Apex sales director to the first three meetings.
The first distribution agreement was signed within four months. A second followed two months later.
QuickShip runs a 12,000 sq ft warehouse serving e-commerce brands. When they called us, nearly one in five orders left the building late. Customer complaints were rising and two key accounts had threatened to leave.
We spent three days observing the pick-pack-ship cycle. The root cause was not lazy staff: it was a confusing slotting system that forced pickers to walk twice the necessary distance, combined with a paper-based quality check that created a bottleneck at the packing bench.
We reslotted the top 200 SKUs by velocity, replaced the paper QC sheet with a simple tablet app and introduced a 15-minute morning huddle so the team could flag problems before they snowballed.
Rajan Patel had grown Greenfield from a one-van operation to a 45-person haulage company. Every decision still ran through him. He was working 70-hour weeks and knew it was unsustainable.
We ran 360-degree feedback interviews with all four senior managers and Rajan himself. The results showed that the managers were capable but had never been given clear authority or accountability frameworks. Rajan was inadvertently undermining them by answering questions they could handle.
Over six months we coached each manager individually, set up a weekly senior leadership meeting with a fixed agenda and helped Rajan define which decisions required his input and which did not.
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