Who we’ve worked with
Businesses rarely slow down because the work dries up. They slow down because the way things get done stops working. I find what’s actually causing that, sort it out properly, and leave it working without you holding it together.
Book a callThe founders and leadership teams I work with aren’t short of clients or effort. They’re short of time, and the time is going into places that don’t pay.
None of this is a discipline problem. It’s structural, and structure is fixable.
Sales process, pipeline visibility, proposals, follow up, and a CRM that reflects reality rather than sitting unused.
Delivery workflows, clear ownership, handovers, client onboarding, and the capacity planning that protects your margin.
Roles and accountability, recruitment and employee onboarding, internal communication, and reducing how much depends on any one person.
The tools you use and whether they talk to each other, templates, policies, SOPs, and a knowledge base people can actually find things in.
Automating a broken process just makes it break faster, so I fix the process first and then automate the parts worth automating.
If something in your business is slow, inconsistent, or entirely in your head, it’s in scope.
Most people know the business could run better without being certain what to change first. This is what that’s for. It’s a piece of work in its own right, with a fixed price and a clear deliverable, and it follows the same structured process every time.
You complete a short set of questions covering how the business is set up, where you think the inefficiencies are, and what you want to get out of working together. I go through whatever already exists, your documentation, your systems and your numbers, so we don’t spend the session on things I can find out myself.
We work through every area of the business in turn, from how work comes in to how it gets delivered and how the business runs itself. I ask the questions and you talk. Usually that’s with you and your leadership team, and where it’s useful I’ll speak to other people separately, because the people doing the work often see things the leadership team doesn’t.
I set out the main issues I can see and how they relate to each other, then turn that into a prioritised roadmap built around the goals you told me about at the start, rather than a generic list of best practice.
A written, prioritised roadmap and a session with me to walk you through it. What needs attention, in what order, and who owns each piece. Where something needs building from scratch, the roadmap says so. Designing it happens when we come to do the work.
It’s yours to keep. Implement it yourself, hand it to someone else, or ask me to do it. You decide once you can see the whole picture.
When you already know what needs fixing, we can skip the roadmap and go straight to the work. Fixed scope, fixed outcome, a clear end point. I get into the detail, sort it out, document it and hand it over.
When there’s more than one thing to sort out, or you’d rather have operational capacity you can point at whatever matters most. This always starts with the roadmap, because that’s what we then work through together. We agree a fixed amount of time each month, and each month we agree where that time goes, based on the roadmap and on what the business needs at that point. The longer I’m in a business, the more useful I get.
If you’re not ready to decide between them, the roadmap is the answer. Buy that on its own and it will tell you which one you need.
Everything’s priced against what actually needs doing, so you’ll get a clear number before you commit to anything.
I’m Kelly Stafford. I spent the first part of my career in marketing, and then nine years with a Swiss agency, starting in marketing and moving into senior operating roles as the business grew, including Chief of Staff and Chief Operating Officer.
Nine years in one growing business teaches you the pattern. At every new stage, more work came in, the team got bigger, and the way things had always been done quietly stopped working. Handovers broke. Nobody was sure who owned what. Everything important ran through two or three people, and one was almost always the founder.
I’d always wanted to run something of my own, and what I kept coming back to was that gap. Plenty of people will tell a founder what to fix. Very few will get into the business and actually do it. That’s why Clearway exists.
The best processes aren’t the most sophisticated ones. They’re the ones people actually use.
MBA. First Class BA (Hons) in Business and Marketing. Nine years with a Swiss agency, including Chief of Staff and Chief Operating Officer.
Thirty minutes. Tell me where the business feels hardest at the moment and I’ll ask a lot of questions. We’ll take it from there.
Book a callOr email me at kelly@clearwayoperations.co.uk