Operations consultancy for SMBs across the UK
We are hired when a business has outgrown the way it runs.
HAILO is an operations consultancy for small and mid-sized businesses. Companies come to us at a specific moment: the work still gets done, but it takes more people, more spreadsheets and more chasing than it did a year ago, and nobody can point at exactly where the extra effort went. We find where your operations lose time, consolidate the spreadsheet sprawl underneath it, and automate the work that repeats.
That is a deliberately narrow offer. We are not a software vendor and we do not arrive with a stack to sell.
What people say when they call us
None of these are unusual, and none of them show up as a line item. They are the symptoms of a business whose operating model was designed for a smaller version of itself.
Four people maintain versions of the same spreadsheet.
Nobody is wrong and nobody agrees. The reconciliation work is invisible on any org chart, and it grows with every new customer.
The founder is still the fastest way to get an answer.
Knowledge that lives in one head is a capacity ceiling and a single point of failure. It is also the reason holidays are stressful.
We bought the software and nobody uses it.
Implementation stopped at configuration. The tool was never fitted to how the work actually moves, so the old process quietly continued beside it.
Month-end is a fire drill every month.
The same exports, the same manual joins, the same three days lost. It repeats, which is what makes it worth automating rather than enduring.
How an engagement runs
Within months from first conversation to a team running something new, though the diagnostic alone is often enough to change what a quarter is spent on.
- 01
Diagnostic 1–2 weeks
We sit with the people doing the work and follow a job end to end — the exports, the re-keying, the approvals, the waiting. What comes out is a map of where hours go and what each recurring loss costs you in a year.
- 02
Prioritisation 1 week
Everything on the map gets a value and an effort. You pick from a ranked list rather than a proposal, and anything we cannot justify on return is left on it.
- 03
Build 4–8 weeks
Pipelines that replace the manual joins, automations for the steps that repeat, and reporting that reads from one source instead of four. Built on the systems you already pay for wherever they will carry it.
- 04
Handover Ongoing
Your team runs it, with documentation written for them rather than for us. We stay available, but the engagement is designed to end.
Capacity, not headcount
The point of this work is not to need fewer people. It is to stop spending the people you have on work an automation should be doing, so the same team can take on what it currently has to turn down. Every engagement is scoped against the capacity it returns, and if a piece of work stops earning its place we say so and end it — the trust is worth more to us than the invoice.
Common questions
Are you selling software?
No. We are a consultancy that writes code. There is no HAILO platform to subscribe to and no seat licence at the end of it — what we build belongs to you and runs in your accounts.
What happens to our data?
It stays in your systems. Diagnostics read from your environment under your access controls, and nothing we handle is exposed to public model training. Where an AI tool is part of a build, it runs against your data in your tenancy.
How small is too small?
If one person can still hold the whole operation in their head and nothing is being re-keyed, you do not need us yet. The work pays for itself when a process repeats often enough that automating it returns real hours.
Find out what your operations cost you
The assessment takes a few minutes and gives you a figure for the capacity your current processes absorb. No call required to see it.