A Strategy Consulting engagement that surfaced redundant SaaS spend, overlapping tools, and a clear 90-day automation roadmap — before a single workflow was built.
This firm had been growing steadily for three years. They went from six people to fourteen, added clients, added services, and added tools at every step along the way. Nobody had ever stopped to take inventory. There was a CRM for sales. A project tool for delivery. A separate invoicing tool that didn't talk to the project tool. Notion for internal documentation. Two different scheduling tools — one that the sales team liked, one that the ops lead had set up independently and that half the team had never heard of. Slack for everything that didn't fit anywhere else. And a handful of other subscriptions that had been bought for specific purposes and never cancelled when those purposes went away.
The leadership team knew something was off. Their word for it was "chaotic," which is actually a useful description — it means things get done but the path to done is different every time and depends too much on who's doing it. Onboarding new people was slow because there was no canonical way to do anything. Handoffs between sales and delivery were inconsistent. The ops lead was spending meaningful time each week just answering questions about which tool to use for what.
They came to us asking for help with automation. That's how these conversations often start — someone has read about AI and automation, they want some of that, and they're not sure exactly what form it should take. Our first question is always: before we build anything, do you know what you're actually spending on tools right now, and do you know which ones people are actively using? They didn't. Nobody did. That's usually the first sign that a systems audit is the right starting point.
What we proposed was a one-week engagement: a full systems inventory, a working session with key stakeholders to map workflows against tools, and a set of concrete recommendations before any build work began. They agreed, and we started the following Monday.
We began by asking the ops lead to pull together every tool subscription she was aware of, every login, every billing email she could find. That list had nine items on it. Then we asked the same question to two other senior team members independently. Between the three lists, we ended up with eleven distinct tools — including two that none of the three of them had mentioned, discovered only because we asked specifically about email-connected apps and calendar integrations. Tools accumulate in the gaps between people's awareness. That's a predictable pattern, and it's one reason you can't audit a tool stack purely from the top down.
The second step was a half-day working session with the ops lead and two senior team members. Not a discovery call — an actual working session, structured around specific workflows. We went through the five workflows that touched the most people: new client onboarding, project kickoff, time tracking and invoicing, internal reporting, and sales-to-delivery handoff. For each one, we mapped what the actual steps were, which tools each step touched, and where data was being moved manually from one system to another. That last question is the most revealing. Manual data movement is almost always a sign of two things: a missing integration, and a decision that somebody made once and never revisited.
What the working session surfaced was a pattern we see frequently in firms that have grown organically. Tools had been added to solve specific problems, but nobody had ever gone back to check whether older tools were still needed once the new ones were in place. Two of the scheduling tools were functionally identical. One invoicing tool was a legacy subscription from before HubSpot had invoicing capability — HubSpot now did everything the legacy tool did, but nobody had turned the legacy tool off. One project management tool was being used by exactly two people, both of whom said they'd use whatever the rest of the team was using if asked.
We scored each tool against three criteria: active usage (was the team actually using it?), unique capability (did it do something nothing else in the stack did?), and integration cost (how much manual work did it create or eliminate?). Four tools failed on two or more criteria. Those were the cuts.
The deliverable from the audit was a 12-page document with three sections. The first was the tool inventory with usage data, cost, and our recommendation for each tool: keep, cut, or consolidate. Four tools were recommended for immediate cancellation. The total monthly cost of those four tools was $3,400. One of them, notably, had been on autopay for over a year with no active users — it had just never been turned off.
The second section was a workflow map for each of the five core processes we'd audited, showing the current state and a recommended future state. This isn't automation recommendations yet — it's just clarity. What should the process actually be, with the tools you're keeping? In several cases, the teams hadn't had an agreed-upon answer to that question. The map gave them one.
The third section was the 90-day automation roadmap. Six workflows, ranked by a simple effort-versus-impact matrix. The top two — new client onboarding and sales-to-delivery handoff — were scoped in enough detail that they could move directly to a build. We handed those two off to our automation team as a follow-on engagement, which started within 30 days of the consulting engagement closing.
The $3,400 per month in savings happened before anything was built. Those subscriptions were cancelled in the same week the audit report was delivered. For a 14-person firm, that's not a rounding error — it's meaningful recurring overhead gone from the P&L with a single afternoon of work.
The clarity produced by the workflow mapping turned out to be at least as valuable as the cost savings, even though it's harder to put a number on. The ops lead reported that the week after the working session, the volume of "which tool should I use for this" questions in Slack dropped noticeably. When you give a team a clear picture of what each tool is for and what the standard process is, a lot of low-grade friction just goes away on its own.
The two automation builds that followed — onboarding and the sales-to-delivery handoff — were faster to scope and faster to build because of the audit work. We already had the workflow maps. We already knew the tools. We weren't discovering the process during the build; we were building against a clear brief. That's the compounding value of doing the strategy work first: everything downstream of it is less expensive and less risky.
The leadership team has since referred two other firms in their network to us for audits. Their description of the engagement, as relayed back to us, was that it felt unusually direct — like being told the truth about your own systems by someone with no stake in which tools you keep or cut. That's precisely the kind of advisory relationship we try to build.
"I kept waiting for the upsell. It never came. They just told us what to cut."
A systems audit takes one week and often pays for itself before we build a single workflow. Book a call and we'll tell you whether it makes sense for where you are.