The Census
One facilitated day inside your firm, counting the work that never reaches an invoice. By the end of it you'll know how much of the week goes on chasing, drafting, reporting, and following up, what that costs you, and which of it your people could hand over so they get their time back for the work clients actually pay for.
Why counting comes first
Somebody sees a demonstration, likes it, and buys it. Then the firm spends the next six months trying to find work for the thing it bought. The tool is fine. It was simply never pointed at anything that mattered here.
Counting first turns that around. Once the work is visible and weighed properly, the next step gets much clearer: hand it to an agent, fix the process, keep it human, or leave it alone for now. It is also a good deal harder to sell you something you don't need once the work is written down in your own people's handwriting.
The other half of it is who does the counting. People support what they help to create. Frontline staff know exactly where the week goes, because it goes on them. They rarely get asked. Management knows what the firm is trying to be, and where the money leaks. Put both around one table for a day and you get an honest count, which is the only kind worth having.
I facilitate. Your people count. Nothing about the day requires you to know anything about AI.
AI projects earn their place when they start from a specific, well-understood pain inside the way the firm actually operates, with the people who do the work helping to aim them.
That is the whole design of the Census. It counts the work with your frontline staff standing over the table, before a single euro goes near a solution.
The day
It isn't a rigid timetable, and firms run at different speeds. This is the shape of the day, and the order things tend to happen in.
First thing
Your boardroom, your people, one day set aside. No laptops, no phones out on the table, no recording. Card and pen, and a printed roll unrolled down the length of the table. Frontline staff as well as management, because half the work I'm looking for never appears in a management report.
The analogue rule isn't nostalgia. No recording, no transcript, and no digital copy of the conversation leaves the room; the roll stays with your firm. By the time we start counting, everyone has usually worked out that this is a day about the work rather than a day about them.
No preparation needed. Bring the mess.Through the morning
Every piece of work that never reaches an invoice goes on the roll, written by the person who actually does it. The report reformatted for the third time. The call notes nobody wrote up. The follow-up that never got logged. The chasing, endless chasing, for something agreed weeks ago.
It gets loud around mid-morning. Somebody says a job takes ten minutes and three people at the far end of the table look up. That disagreement is the most useful thing that happens all day, and it only happens because both ends of the firm are in the room.
Your handwriting, not mine.After lunch
By lunchtime you know what the work is. In the afternoon we put numbers on it: how often, how long, where it lands, what gets pushed to the evening because of it, and what the firm doesn't get to do while it's being done.
I'll say this plainly, because somebody in the room is usually thinking it: the Census counts work, not people. I never ask who does a job or whether the firm needs them. I ask what the task is, how much effort it takes, and what the firm gets back for it. Where the work lands gets recorded, because weight has to land somewhere; the person it lands on is never what's being weighed. We're looking for the work your team would be glad to hand over, and the work they'd be right to keep.
Work counted, then valued.Before you go home
The day ends with a direction rather than a decision. Deploy, not yet, or something smaller than you came in expecting: a single workflow to start with, or a process fix that needs no AI at all. Often it's the third one, and often the work worth handing over first is not the work anyone would have guessed that morning.
Nobody signs anything on the day, and there's no hard sell afterwards. Half past five, after a full day of thinking, is no time to make a decision that matters. You make the go or no-go call in your own time, and we take it up from there.
Your team's only job is to be in the room. Everything between the steps is mine.
To be clear
I don't score your firm's maturity, and nobody gets quizzed on how many tools they know. The day is about your work, not your vocabulary.
No solution gets chosen, never mind shown, before the work has been counted. There isn't a laptop in the room to demo on.
The Census counts work, not people. What gets weighed is the task: how often it happens, how heavy it is, and what it crowds out. Never the person doing it.
You leave with the roll, the Blueprint, and a straight answer, and the answer is allowed to be "not yet". The day is useful whichever way you decide.
Afterwards
It stays with you. It goes back up on the wall of whatever room your firm argues in, and it keeps being true whether or not you ever work with me again.
A written plan in your hands two days later: what was counted, what it weighs, what I'd hand over first and why, and what I'd leave well alone for now. Plain English. No appendix of vendor logos.
The Blueprint lands, and then it's yours to sit with, argue about, and put in front of whoever else needs to see it. Any deployment price in the Blueprint holds for 90 days, and so does the credit below. I don't chase.
The Census is €1,850. Go ahead within 90 days and the whole of it comes off the deployment, whenever your place opens. You're paying for the day either way, and getting it back if the day says go.
Worth knowing:
You don't need a technical background. The Census is designed for business owners and their teams, not developers.
Your systems and data don't need to be perfect. Part of the day is understanding what you actually have to work with.
No computers in the room, no recording, and the roll stays with your firm. Confidentiality is built into how the day runs.
I'm in Athlone and I travel for Census days. The date is set to suit your team, not my diary.
If the week you've just read about sounds like your firm's, the Census is how we find out what it's actually worth. Tell me about the firm and we'll set a date.
If you'd rather start smaller, most firms buy an hour of my honest opinion first. The AI Orientation is €450, and if a Census isn't the right next step for you, that hour is where you'll hear it.