Process Discovery Sprint
One week. £1,500 fixed. We map one of your processes, find the automation opportunities, and hand you a prioritised roadmap with cost estimates. No retainer required, no further commitment.
You suspect there's automation ROI, but you can't quantify it.
Most UK SMEs we talk to know they have automation opportunities but can't articulate which ones, what they're worth, or what the build would cost. A discovery sprint exists for exactly that gap — a fixed-fee, one-week engagement that turns a hunch into a costed roadmap you can act on without us.
- You're 10–200 staff — Sweet spot for mid-market automation. Below 10 staff manual workarounds usually win; above 200 you need internal ops engineering.
- You have a specific process in mind — Lead-to-cash, client onboarding, invoice automation, returns workflow — anything that runs at least weekly and costs material time.
- You're not ready for a £15k+ project — Either you need to test us first or you genuinely don't know if the work is worth doing. The sprint resolves both.
Six things in your inbox at the end of the week
Every deliverable is in writing. No deck-as-deliverable nonsense. The roadmap is yours to keep, share with your team, or hand to another consultancy.
Five days, three meetings, one document
Tight, low-overhead, fixed-fee. We don't bill hours; we don't pad the work. The whole point of a sprint is speed.
We walk through the process with you, the team members who touch it, and the systems it lives on. Recorded so you don't need to take notes.
We rebuild the workflow in Miro/Lucidchart with you not in the room, talk to a few team members if needed, and start the costed analysis.
We share the draft map, sanity-check assumptions with you, and confirm the opportunities to dig into further.
PDF + working files. Includes everything described above. You have it before the weekend.
We walk through the roadmap with you and your team. Q&A, push-back, refinement. Then it's yours.
Why the sprint exists
We built the discovery sprint because most automation consulting engagements waste the first three weeks figuring out what's worth doing. By the time the consultancy hands over a recommendation, the client has already spent £15k and we've barely started building anything. That's bad value.
The sprint flips the model. We do the discovery and analysis as a tight, fixed-fee piece of work first. You see exactly what we'd build, how much it would cost, and what it would save — before you commit to anything bigger. If the maths doesn't work, you walk away with a useful document and we're out £1,500 of opportunity cost. If it does, we both have a clear, costed plan we can act on.
This is what we'd want, if we were the client.
What £1,500 buys you
- About 12-18 hours of senior consultant time across the week.
- Three meetings (kickoff, mid-sprint, walkthrough).
- A 15–25 page written roadmap.
- A live workflow map in Miro or Lucidchart you keep access to.
- Optional: a 30-minute follow-up call within 60 days if anything changes.
- The right to implement the roadmap yourself, with another consultancy, or with us. No lock-in, no NDA traps, no obligation.
At our standard rates (£150–£200/hour fully loaded), a sprint would normally cost £2.4k–£3.6k. We price it at £1,500 because (a) we want the work to feel low-friction to commit to, and (b) it pays back enough that we'd rather run lots of sprints than fewer larger discovery phases. If we end up working together longer afterwards, the £1,500 is credited against the first project or first month of retainer.
What this isn't
- It's not a sales call dressed up as an audit. Every deliverable is in writing and useful even if we never work together again.
- It's not a hook to drag you into a long retainer. The £1,500 stands alone.
- It's not a 'we use AI to write your audit in 60 seconds' tool. We have one of those, free, and it's useful as a starter — but a real sprint involves talking to your team, watching the workflow run, and building a costed business case. That takes humans.
- It's not a one-size-fits-all template we copy-paste. Every sprint is built around your specific process, your specific stack, your specific team.
What a typical sprint looks like
For a 30-person UK marketing agency, recent sprints have covered:
- Sold-to-started workflow (deal closed in HubSpot → project setup in Asana → time codes in Harvest → invoice schedule in Xero). Identified £18k/year of senior account-lead time recoverable through a 4-scenario Make.com build (estimated build cost: £12k, payback 8 months).
- Freelancer onboarding and payment workflow. Identified £6k/year of finance-team time + £1.2k/year of error-cost avoided. Build cost £6k. Payback 10 months. Recommended skipping in favour of a higher-ROI opportunity.
- Retainer health scoring. Identified an unquantified-but-likely £30k+/year of preventable retainer churn. Build cost £8k. Recommended for phase 1.
For a recruitment agency, an accounting firm, a B2B SaaS, the specific opportunities differ but the shape of the deliverable is the same: a written, ranked, costed roadmap.
How to book
Book a 30-minute call below. We use that call to scope which process to focus the sprint on and confirm fit. If we're not the right firm for your situation we'll say so and recommend an alternative (we do this about 1 in 5 calls).
Once booked, the sprint usually starts within 2–3 weeks. Slots are limited because we don't run more than 2 sprints in any given week.
Related Watermelon services
- Automation Consulting — the build phase that often follows a sprint.
- AI Automation Agency — when the build is LLM-heavy.
- What is a Fractional CAO? — the ongoing-leadership model that some sprint clients move to.
- Free AI Process Audit — the 30-second version. Useful as a starter; the sprint is the depth version.
Book your sprint discovery call
30 minutes to confirm fit and pick the process. £1,500 + VAT fixed once we proceed. No retainer obligation, no scope creep, no hourly bills.