Case Studies

The challenge

The company had grown past the point where one person could manage every conversation. Its communication structure had stayed the same.

Client emails went straight to the founder. Team members sent questions on Slack. Suppliers chased invoices. Meeting requests came in all day.

At the start of the engagement, the founder was:

• Receiving 120+ emails and 80+ Slack messages a day
• Spending 3.5 hours a day reading, sorting and replying
• Holding more than 30 open requests in their head with no shared record
• Answering clients in an average of 9 hours

Very little of this needed the founder’s expertise. The hard part was deciding what should happen next with each message, and that decision kept landing on their desk. The founder could hand over a task, but they had no one to hand over the job of keeping track of everything.

What the EA changed

Step one: a communication audit

In the first week, the EA logged every message that reached the founder and tagged it by sender, topic and the action it needed. The audit showed that 78% of messages needed no founder input at all.

Step two: a four-way sorting system

The EA sorted every incoming message into one of four categories:

Step three: written decision rules

The founder and EA agreed a one-page document covering what the founder always wanted to handle personally, which clients needed a direct reply from the founder, and which approvals the EA could give on their behalf. The EA updated it every time a new type of request came up.

The first three weeks

1. Week 1

   Learn the patterns

   The EA shadowed the founder’s workflow. They studied how the founder wrote emails, which Slack threads mattered, which clients expected a personal reply, and which decisions the founder never wanted to give up. The goal for this week was context. The EA held off on autonomy until they had it.

2. Week 2

   Take ownership of routine work

   The EA started handling routine messages, drafting replies for approval and chasing delegated actions. They stopped forwarding messages without context and started presenting each issue ready for a decision.

   Before “John emailed about the project. What should I tell him?”

   After “John is waiting for approval on the revised scope. I’ve checked the project notes. The only open decision is whether to approve the extra 12 hours. Revised scope attached. Reply ‘approve’ and I’ll confirm with him today.”

3. Week 3

   Own the workflow

   The EA took responsibility for the whole communication system. They tracked every open reply, chased team members and raised anything that had stalled. The founder still made the decisions. The EA made sure each decision reached the right person and got done.

The daily wrap-up

Every afternoon, the EA sent the founder a five-line summary:

1. Handled today: what the EA resolved
2. Waiting on others: who owes what, and by when
3. Needs your decision: each item prepared with context and a recommendation
4. Follow-ups due tomorrow
5. For your information: things the founder should know but doesn’t need to act on

This summary built the trust the founder needed to stop checking the inbox themselves.

Tools

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Workspace
• Slack
• Project management tool

The EA worked inside the company’s existing setup. The new workflow drove the change. The business added no new software.

Results after 8 weeks

That adds up to almost 14 hours a week back in the founder’s diary.

The challenge

The Managing Director’s calendar was full every week. On the surface, that looked like a productivity problem. In practice, the calendar showed no priorities at all.

Internal meetings, client calls, partner conversations and recurring check-ins went into whatever slot was open. In a typical week, the MD had:

• 34 meetings, totalling 28 hours
• 1 hour of uninterrupted time for strategic work
• A written agenda for only 20% of meetings
• 11 recurring meetings that no one had reviewed in over a year

Each meeting also created work before and after it. Nobody owned that work, so it fell back on the MD.

Step one: a calendar audit

The EA started by analysing six weeks of the MD’s calendar before moving a single meeting. They sorted every meeting into six categories:

Strategic work, the MD’s most valuable time, made up just 4% of the week. The MD reviewed the breakdown and decided which categories needed them in the room.

Step two: calendar rules

The EA wrote a set of scheduling rules and applied them to every new request:

• Protected strategy blocksTwo 4-hour blocks a week that no internal meeting could take
• Delegated meetingsA senior team member took over 4 recurring internal meetings
• Built-in prep timeAny meeting needing preparation got a 15 to 30 minute block before it
• Batched meetingsClient calls on Tuesdays and Thursdays, internal meetings on Mondays and Wednesdays
• Purpose firstAny meeting request without a clear purpose got a polite question before acceptance
• Shorter defaults25 and 50 minute meetings to leave breathing room
• Quarterly reviewEvery recurring meeting reviewed each quarter and kept, shortened or dropped

Step three: meeting preparation

Managing the calendar solved half the problem. The other half sat in the work around each meeting.

Before every important meeting, the EA prepared a one-page brief:

After the meeting, the EA logged the actions, sent a follow-up to attendees within 24 hours and tracked each action to completion.

The four-week handover

1. Week 1

   Audit

   Calendar audit and categorisation.

2. Week 2

   Agree the rules

   The MD agrees the calendar rules. The EA starts screening new requests.

3. Week 3

   Restructure

   The EA restructures the following month’s calendar and starts writing meeting briefs.

4. Week 4

   Full ownership

   The EA owns scheduling, briefs and post-meeting follow-up end to end.

Tools

• Google Calendar
• Gmail
• Zoom
• Calendly
• Slack
• Project management system

The EA set up scheduling links for routine external meetings to cut out back-and-forth emails.

Results after 12 weeks

Half the meeting hours, and eight times the strategy time every week.

The challenge

This CEO had email and scheduling under control. Their problem was visibility.

Projects came up in meetings, got tracked in different tools and were chased by different people. The CEO kept asking the same questions:

• What’s the status of this?
• Who owns it?
• Did that get done?
• What did we decide?
• What are we waiting for?
• What needs my attention this week?

All the answers existed, scattered across Slack, project boards and meeting notes. Nobody pulled them together for the CEO. At the start of the engagement:

• The leadership team had 23 overdue actions
• Preparing for each leadership meeting took 4 hours
• The CEO spent around 6 hours a week chasing updates
• Only 30% of decisions were recorded anywhere

What the EA took over

The EA became responsible for a steady operating rhythm around the leadership team:

• Keeping project and action trackers up to date
• Preparing leadership meetings
• Recording every decision in a shared decision log
• Chasing commitments until they were done
• Writing and maintaining SOPs
• Producing a weekly executive brief
• Tracking decisions waiting for approval
• Passing information between departments

Department heads kept running their teams. The EA connected the work between them.

The weekly executive brief

Every Friday afternoon, the EA sent the CEO a single document pulled from Slack, the project board and meeting notes. The CEO could read it in about 10 minutes.

The CEO used the brief to prepare for the week ahead. If a section stopped being useful, the EA cut it.

SOP development

The EA noticed that people handled the same recurring processes in different ways. They prioritised processes that were:

• Repeated often
• Dependent on one person
• Easy to forget
• Hard to hand over
• Important to other teams

In the first four months, the EA documented 18 SOPs, including client onboarding, monthly reporting, new hire setup and vendor payments. For the first time, the business had a written record of how things got done.

The leadership meeting cycle

The EA ran the same cycle for every leadership meeting:

Each meeting now kicked off the next round of work.

The six-week handover

1. Weeks 1 to 2

   Map

   The EA maps every tool, tracker and recurring meeting, and interviews each department head.

2. Weeks 3 to 4

   Build

   The EA builds one central action tracker and decision log, and runs the first leadership meeting cycle.

3. Weeks 5 to 6

   Brief

   The weekly brief begins. The CEO gives feedback and the EA adjusts the format.

4. Week 7 onward

   Document

   SOP development starts on the highest-risk processes.

Tools

• Slack
• Notion
• Asana / ClickUp
• Google Workspace
• Zoom
• Shared documentation

The EA kept the existing tools and built one rhythm across them.

Results after 4 months

The CEO got 5 hours a week back from chasing updates, and almost every decision now lives in writing.