We ask every client for honest feedback at the end of an engagement. Here is a selection from the past two years.
We brought Pro Advantage in because our margins had been shrinking for three consecutive quarters and we could not figure out why. Within ten days they identified that our procurement process was adding 11% to material costs through duplicate ordering and missed volume discounts. The fix was straightforward once we could see it. We saved roughly £68,000 in the first year.
I was sceptical about hiring consultants. I had done it once before with a larger firm and ended up with a 90-page report that nobody read. The Pro Advantage team gave us a four-page action plan and then stayed for eight weeks to help us implement it. Revenue grew 22% that year, which was the first real growth we had seen since 2019.
The coaching programme helped me step back from day-to-day firefighting and actually run the business. My consultant challenged me on things my team would never say to my face, like the fact that I was the bottleneck in every approval process. Hard to hear, but it changed how I delegate.
We needed a cash flow forecast to support a £250k loan application. Pro Advantage built the model in under two weeks and coached me through the bank meeting. The loan was approved on the first attempt. Our previous application, which we had prepared ourselves, was rejected.
Pennine Plastics, a £7m-turnover injection moulding company in West Yorkshire, had seen its gross margin fall from 38% to 29% over 18 months. The management team suspected rising resin prices were the main cause, but the numbers did not fully explain the drop.
During our two-week diagnostic we discovered three separate problems. First, the purchasing manager was splitting orders across four suppliers instead of consolidating with two, which meant the company missed volume discount thresholds on its three most-used polymers. Second, a scheduling error on the night shift was causing 12% more scrap than the day shift. Third, the quoting spreadsheet had not been updated in two years, so new jobs were being priced using outdated material costs.
We renegotiated supplier contracts (consolidating to two preferred suppliers saved 8% on resin costs), retrained the night shift supervisor on changeover procedures, and rebuilt the quoting tool with live material pricing pulled from the company's accounting system.
Bridgeway Recruitment had been operating for four years and had a solid client base in the logistics sector. Revenue was stuck at around £1.2m, and founder David Ngata was working 70-hour weeks handling sales, account management and back-office admin himself. He wanted to grow but could not see how to do it without burning out.
David was spending roughly 40% of his time on tasks that a £28k-per-year administrator could handle: invoicing, candidate database maintenance, compliance paperwork. His sales pipeline had no structure; leads came in through personal referrals and were tracked in a notebook.
We helped David hire an office manager and set up a simple CRM system (we recommended one that costs £45 per month, not the £800-per-month platform a previous advisor had suggested). We built a sales process with defined stages, weekly targets and a follow-up schedule. David started spending 80% of his time on business development and client relationships.
Within 12 months, revenue reached £1.46m. David now works 50-hour weeks and has hired a second recruiter.
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