Client Results
The Numbers and the Mechanisms Behind The Constraints No One Could See
Every result below started the same way. A process that looked like a staffing problem, an effort problem, or a demand problem. In each case it wasn't. The constraint was something nobody could see, because nothing in the process required anyone to look.
That's what an operational performance audit is for. Here is what it found three times.
Client confidentiality prevents me from naming specific clients. I'm happy to discuss specifics on a call.
How a Process Audit Recovered $7M in Un-billed Revenue
Client: Not-for-profit health insurer with 2M+ members. Recovered in under 6 months
The Engagement
A not-for-profit health insurance company serving more than two million members hired me to find inefficiencies in a core process and design an efficient future state for both the process and the system supporting it. Recovering revenue was not part of the brief.
What the Audit Found
Mapping the current state meant examining the reports leadership relied on to monitor the process, not just the process itself. Two reports covered the same activity. Neither was wrong on its own, and neither showed the full extent of the problem. Compared against each other, they revealed a discrepancy. A deeper dive into the report results revealed multiple members had never been billed.
That is why it had stayed invisible. Nobody was looking at the two reports side by side, because nothing in the process required it. The gap existed only in the space between them.
What We Did
Recovery first. We documented the discrepancy, established the amount owed, and supported re-billing. $7M in revenue that had been earned but never invoiced.
Then prevention, which mattered more. Recovering the money once changes nothing if the process can lose it again. We adjusted the process itself and standardized the reporting configurations, so the same class of discrepancy now surfaces on its own rather than depending on someone happening to compare two reports.
Why it Matters
The $7M was not the objective. It was found because the audit examined the process and the reports together, and because the future-state work required understanding how the current state was actually measured. Operational reviews that look only at workflow, or only at reporting, don't find this kind of gap.
That's what an operational performance audits are for.
How Productivity Visibility Unlocked Capacity at a Busy Service Based Business
Client: Automotive service with multi-million-dollar revenue. Results within 4 months
The Situation
The business was already a multi-million-dollar operation with a full workload. The owner wasn’t sure how to take his shop to the next level. He wasn't dealing with a demand problem, but he was dealing with a visibility problem. He just didn’t know it yet. The shop wasn't tracking employee productivity, so there was no way to see how work was actually distributed across the team.
What That Cost
Without productivity data, every staffing decision was a guess. Some employees were overloaded while others had capacity, and nobody could tell which was which. Training gaps stayed invisible. Expectations were set by instinct rather than evidence, which made them unfair to someone in either direction. Hiring couldn't be targeted, because no one knew where the real constraint was.
What We Did
Through the Empowered Employee Growth™ framework, the owner implemented productivity tracking and then used it to make decisions he previously couldn't:
See who was overworked and who had capacity, and rebalance accordingly
Identify where specific employees needed additional training
Calculate fair, evidence-based performance expectations
Determine where additional staff were genuinely needed, rather than hiring broadly
The Result
Throughput rose across the shop. The owner reported that revenue doubled within four months.
Why It Matters
The shop was already busy. The constraint wasn't demand or effort. It was that no one could see where the team's capacity was actually going. Measurement came first, and every other decision followed from it.
From a 48-week Backlog to 30 Days
Client: Healthcare organization. 200% capacity increase in under 6 months.
The Situation
Turnaround time had compounded to 48 weeks. Requests entered a process that couldn't keep pace with volume, and the backlog fed itself. The longer the queue grew, the more time the team spent managing the queue instead of working it.
What We Found
This wasn't a staffing problem or an effort problem. The process and the system underneath it had never been designed for the volume they were now carrying, and the data inside the system had degraded to the point where it was generating work of its own.
What We Did
Three tracks over less than six months:
System and data clean-up. [What was wrong with the data, and what fixing it eliminated.]
Complete process overhaul. We rebuilt the process end to end rather than optimizing steps inside a design that couldn't scale. [The two or three most consequential changes.]
New system design and implementation. We designed and implemented a system built for the actual workflow, rather than continuing to adapt the workflow to the old tool.
The Result
Turnaround time fell from a compounded 48 weeks to 30 days or less and capacity increased 200%.
Why It Matters
A 48-week backlog looks like a resourcing problem, and organizations usually respond by hiring into it. The constraint here was design. Once the process and the system matched the real volume of work, the same team absorbed three times the throughput.
Every engagement above started with a process that looked like it was working as well as it could.
Start with a FREE 30-Minute Operational Performance Audit to uncover the bottlenecks costing you time, money, and momentum.