Matt runs Watson Textiles, a UK commission agency representing fabric and garment manufacturers from Europe and Asia. He works alongside his wife Andrea, who is in the business four days a week. Between them, they look after a customer base that runs from luxury British heritage brands through to high-street groups and streetwear labels, with orders that range from small stock runs through to full retailer programmes.
The work itself is going well. The customers are loyal. The supplier relationships are deep. The problem is everything around the work.
On a typical office day, Matt sits down at his desk and opens his inbox. Then he stays there. Three hours go past in the morning. Lunch. Calls. A bit of supplier admin. Then he is tidying up at 5pm with another stack of emails that need flagging for the next day. He estimates he spends at least five hours of a seven-hour day inside Outlook. None of that time is doing the thing he is actually paid to do, which is selling fabric.
Ask Matt how much of the working day the inbox takes, and the answer is honest:
I get pulled around, so it's hard to put a number on it. But the good majority of my day when I'm in the office is just spent doing that.
The bit that grinds is not the volume. Matt is good at email. He scans, files, flags, and replies fast. He has a sub-folder system. The bit that grinds is that the inbox is quietly doing the work that should be done by other systems entirely. It is the CRM. It is the project tracker. It is the contract notes for what each customer selected at the last meeting. It is the payment reminder system. It is the to-do list. We have written before about why automating your inbox is usually the wrong answer. Watson Textiles is the case in point.
If something falls out of the inbox, a sample request, a colour selection, a price quote that was sent in the car park between meetings, it does not get caught anywhere else. The next time the customer follows up, Matt has to scroll back through email threads to remember what was agreed.
It happens a lot. A client will say, hey, I still haven't received this, can you let me know? And I'm looking back through my notes and going, I didn't do that.
The diagnosis
The HoursBack Assessment maps where the time actually goes, not where it is meant to go. For Watson Textiles, the diagnostic found four connected workflows all running through the same channel, Matt's inbox, when each of them should have been running through its own structure. Across those four workflows, the assessment identified eighteen specific recommendations and twenty-three hours a week of recoverable time.
The first was the customer pipeline. Matt has somewhere between eight and a dozen active opportunities open at any given moment, each at a different stage. Some are new inquiries. Some are sample requests waiting for the supplier. Some are repeat orders that have not landed yet. Most of these were being tracked in his head, with Asana used selectively. Andrea has the appetite to take more of this on but does not have the context, because the context lives in Matt's notebook and Matt's memory. Not sure whether this pattern applies to your business? Take the 9-question quiz. It scores your readiness in around four minutes.
The second was meeting capture. Matt sees customers face-to-face when suppliers come to London, three meetings a day, two or three days at a time. He takes a paper notebook to those meetings. He photographs the fabric selections and WhatsApps them to the supplier before he leaves the office. The rest, the "she liked the blue stripe, he wants a finer weight, they need it for autumn", is in his head until he writes it up. Sometimes he writes it up. Sometimes there is no time, and the next conversation with that customer has gaps.
The third was payment reconciliation. As commission agents, Watson Textiles get paid by the supplier on whatever the supplier has invoiced and collected from the end customer. To verify those statements, Matt had built a manual order book in Excel, every order keyed in by hand, supplier by supplier, invoice by invoice. He had recently set up an AI workflow to read order confirmations dropped into a folder and populate the order book automatically. That is working at around 85 to 90 per cent accuracy.
The fourth was the marketing absence. Watson Textiles has no LinkedIn presence, no Instagram, and a website Matt describes as "a holding page". Marketing has not been done because there is no time. There is no time because the inbox is full. The inbox is full because there is no structure underneath it. If you want the broader view of what the right stack looks like for a small business, we have published the 7 tools we keep recommending.
None of these four workflows is broken. Each one is running. The agency is healthy. The problem is that all four are routed through the same channel, a single inbox, owned by one person, and that channel is now the bottleneck on growth.
Talking it through is opening up holes I know are there. I run two businesses now. Watson Textiles is the inherited one, lots of back and forth, very little systems in place. The other one I'm building from the ground up, and you have to have the systems in place. The two waters are clashing.
The recommendations
The report set out eighteen recommendations across the four workflows. They are deliberately ordered by leverage, not by ease.
For the customer pipeline, a single source of truth per opportunity, threaded across email, WhatsApp, and Matt's notebook into one record that Andrea can read without Matt explaining it. The infrastructure is light. Asana already exists. The discipline of "every new opportunity gets a card the day it lands" is what is missing. The structural shift is that the inbox becomes a notification feed, not a database.
For meeting capture, AI-summarised meeting recordings on the customer visits where Matt is taking selections, with the supplier loop closed by a structured note rather than a memory recall a week later. Not every meeting needs this. Discovery and selection meetings do. Ad-hoc check-ins do not.
For payment reconciliation, extend the existing AI workflow so it runs the reverse direction too, flagging which invoices are due that week, drafting the reminder emails to the customer accounts contacts, and surfacing any discrepancy between what the supplier has reported and what the order book says is owed. The work Matt already did to read the order confirmations is most of the way to a full automation. The last 20 per cent is the workflow that closes the loop.
For marketing absence, a periodic supplier-led content rhythm. One focused week per month on a single supplier or fabric category, posted to LinkedIn and Instagram with photography Andrea can produce from the existing fabric collections. Indirect outreach, not cold outreach. Reach the buyers who are already scrolling rather than the ones who do not answer the cold call.
Total monthly tool cost across all eighteen recommendations is approximately £250, entirely covered by the tools Watson Textiles already pays for. No new software was recommended. The work those tools do will change. The invoice for them will not.
The diagnosis was not "you need more tools". It was "the tools you have are not yet doing the work they could".
I don't think any of my competitors, any other agents, are thinking how I'm thinking. It's only a lack of resources and time that I haven't done anything sooner.
The outcome so far
Three of the eighteen recommendations are live. Matt is nine hours a week back, against twenty-three hours identified in the assessment. The work is in progress. Fifteen more recommendations to implement. Fourteen more hours a week to recover.
Nine hours back today is more than a day a week. It is the time that goes into the customer conversations and supplier relationships that drive the agency forward. The work that earns the commission, not the admin that gets in the way of it.
When the other fifteen recommendations land, that grows to more than three working days a week back. Over half of Matt's working week, freed up from the inbox and pointed at customers, suppliers, and growth.
The harder-to-quantify recovery is the rework cost. The "I didn't do that" moments where a customer reminder lands and the response is to scroll back through three weeks of email threads to work out what was agreed. Those moments do not have a row on a spreadsheet, but they are the most expensive minutes in the week, because they are the minutes that erode customer trust.
The takeaway
The pattern in small commission-agency businesses, and in most owner-operator businesses we look at, is the same shape. The work itself is fine. The relationships are good. The customers are loyal. The drag is in the connective tissue between the moments of work. The bit that goes "what did I agree on that call", "where is that invoice", "who follows up the cold lead on Tuesday". We see this pattern in nearly every owner-operator business we audit. Michael, a business coach, had three equivalent workflows quietly running his week.
When those connective bits live in one person's inbox and one person's head, growth caps out at the bandwidth of that person's working memory. When they live in structures that anyone in the business can read, a CRM card, a meeting summary, a payment schedule, the bandwidth is the team's, not the owner's.
That is what Watson Textiles is moving towards. Three recommendations are already paying back. Fifteen more sit on the tracker. The work was never the problem. The system around the work was, and the system around the work is being rebuilt, one recommendation at a time.
Talking it through is therapeutic and opens up holes you know are there in a business you know intimately.
Case study subject: Matt Watson.