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Our Process

  • Three phases
  • 4–6 months

Three phases, in that order.

Orientation, Cartography, Exploration — and you know what each phase produces before it starts.

Why the order matters

Skipping a phase is what creates the mess.

Most consultants hand you recommendations and leave you to implement them. We have watched that fail often enough to build the company around not doing it.

You cannot design a system you have not seen running. You cannot build one you have not designed. And a design that was never checked against how the work truly happens gets quietly abandoned within a quarter — replaced by a workaround, which in time becomes the process, which is how you ended up here in the first place.

So, do it the right way: map before you design. Design before you build. Build alongside the people who will run it.

The Cartographer Journey

What each phase actually involves

Roughly four to six months end to end, depending on how many systems and departments are involved.

  1. Weeks 1–4

    Orientation

    4 weeks

    Our objective during Orientation is to understand the current state of your company. We need to know what exists before recommending anything.

     

    Week 1 — Observation.

    We embed with your team to document processes as they exist today. For a brokerage, that means sitting with agents while they coordinate carriers and update customers. For a 3PL, it means following a pallet from receiving through put-away and pick to the truck that takes it out. We are watching for the moments where a person becomes the integration between two systems.

     

    Week 2 — Evaluation.

    We dive into your company's tech stack. This should include any tool or system your team uses day to day: HubSpot, the TMS, the WMS, ticketing, project management, billing, and accounting. We want to find any inefficiencies, redundancies, or choke points that prevent you from being your best.

     

    Week 3 — Validation.

    We compile all of our initial findings into a comprehensive report and walk you through it to make sure we have everything correct, and immediately address any required changes. This is the step that makes the difference: we need to be on the same page, or everything that follows might inherit the error(s).

     

    Week 4 — Gameplan.

    Using all the information we have gathered to this point, we collectively plan the Cartography Phase: what needs to change, who we need to get input from, and what our "definition of done" looks like.



    Deliverables

    • A comprehensive audit findings document that shows how processes and tools are currently configured, including the workarounds nobody remembers exist.
    • A detailed report of your entire HubSpot portal that highlights user roles & permissions, property & object configuration, workflow & automation health, and more.
  2. Weeks 5–18

    Cartography

    14 weeks

    This is the longest phase, and the one people are most surprised by — because it is where architecting and building start to overlap. Nothing gets built before it is designed. But once a design is approved, we start building it rather than filing it away for later.

     

    Weeks 1–3 — Sequencing.

    Our first focus is helping you address some quick wins. By prioritizing operational impact against implementation difficulty, we can determine where we can start making impacts for your team. For example, a daily reconciliation that eats three hours of someone's morning is high impact and usually straightforward — that goes first. However, a data consolidation that requires seven system changes is high impact and hard, so it gets sequenced after the foundations that make it possible.

    Weeks 4–5 — Discovery.

    With some initial fixes in place, our attention turns toward designing your future state. To accomplish that, we need to talk to multiple teams to understand what an "ideal state" looks like. At what point does a quote become a load? How many forms do your customers use to talk to your team? What can the system do on its own versus needing to escalate to a person? These interviews are essential — they directly inform what gets built and how it functions.

     

    Weeks 6–9 — Architecture.

    Using all the context we've gathered from across your company, we can translate concepts into the visualization that will become your new system and processes. Every client's design is different and is customized to ensure that everything, even the cases that don't follow a standard path, are incorporated into your map. We design for all these parameters explicitly, then we'll walk you through the blueprints for sign-off.

     

    Weeks 10–12 — The MVP.

    All the pieces that depend on nothing else get built here — property/object optimizations that were uncovered during the audit, simple (but impactful) automations, and other changes that give time back immediately. We're actively building and improving your systems. By this time in the process, you are not just holding a stack of drawings; you have functional work product.



    Deliverables

    • The Map — your visualisation of a future state that includes process/system blueprints, exception handling/routing, and a documented build plan
    • A MVP of initial builds already running
  3. Weeks 19–24

    Exploration

    6 weeks

    The Exploration Phase heavily involves your team. They are in the trenches, working with us as the Map comes to life, which is the reason the work survives our departure. At this point in our process, there is no regimented schedule. The complexity of the build, the extent of User Acceptance Testing and QA, and the level of training required become our North Star.

     

    Upon completion of this Phase, you will have a wealth of resources: SOPs, recorded walkthroughs and troubleshooting guides, technical schematics, and more. All of it written for the people on your team who will run these things with enough detail that a new hire can't break it.



    Deliverables

    • A fully functional infrastructure and the training to run it
    • An abundance of documentation and resources to ensure nothing can slip through the cracks

Handover

You own it, because you helped build it.

The handover is not a training session where we present something you have never seen. Your team has been making decisions alongside us since Orientation, so by the time we leave they are not inheriting a system — they are continuing to run one.

You keep the maps, the blueprints, the SOPs and the recordings. You can change any of it without calling us, and the documentation is written on the assumption that you will.

Some clients keep us on a retainer afterwards for ongoing optimisation. Plenty don't, and either approach is a perfectly good outcome. The goal was always a system your team can own, maintain, and grow into.

The first step is Orientation, not a contract for everything.

Thirty minutes to start. If it goes somewhere, the next commitment is a scoped Orientation — a real deliverable that stands on its own, not a down payment on a project you haven't agreed to.

Schedule a Chat
  • We map how a load actually moves through your operation today
  • We name which systems conflict, and what that is costing you
  • We describe what an Orientation would cover for you specifically
  • We tell you if we are not a good fit, and refer you to someone who could be