Strategy → Systems · People · AI · The North

What your people know is what your customers pay for. Everything else gets in the way.

Pulpo helps service businesses across the North West organise around the work that creates value and clear away the rest. Lower running costs and a better place to work don’t have to be a trade-off.

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What we work on

Every part of your operation should be there for a good reason.

Over time, some parts start costing more than they’re worth. Your processes, your technology and your people should all support the work your customers pay for. Pulpo finds the parts that don’t, and helps you build your operation around what matters.

Systems

Your business is a system that brings people and technology together to deliver a valuable service. Every business begins the same way. Your customer calls up, speaks to someone who can help, and very quickly they receive the brilliant service that makes them recommend you to other people. Over time, processes get added to the system, each intended to produce a better service, make the work easier to handle or manage risk. But as those processes accumulate, they solidify into a structure that comes between your customer and the service they are paying for. They can turn away valuable business, create work that makes no money and squeeze the enjoyment out of the work.

The first difficulty is knowing where to look, because knowledge work is invisible. That’s where our work begins. Pulpo reveals the shape of your operation, mapping how work moves through your business, measured against what your customers actually expect. You’ll see where your operation is efficient and what it is capable of at its very best. You’ll see what stops your people achieving that every day. Then we work with you and your team to redesign the flows around your customers and the parts of the job that matter.

Lower running costs and better customer outcomes are the natural consequence.

AI

Your customers choose you for what you know and how you do it: your judgement and expertise. Those qualities have, until recently, always been human. Now AI offers the chance to do more, faster, and perhaps more accurately. The appeal is obvious. The risks are less so.

Most AI projects fail not because the technology can’t do the job, but because no one understood what automating the job meant. Pulpo helps you work out where automation will benefit your business and where it won’t, by understanding the work, how it touches your customers and how it affects your people. The aim is to protect the judgement your customers pay for, and take away the work that doesn’t need it.

Even where AI works well, it is fallible, and you need to know where it breaks down. AI is confident, even when it is wrong. It works on hidden assumptions and inherits the problems of any broken process it’s built on. Once those are built into how you work, they become harder to see. Its mistakes sit where no one looks. Pulpo helps you find where it breaks, builds in the checks that let your people trust it, and gives those running the business and those doing the work the view that each of them needs.

People

Your competitors can buy the same technology. They can never copy your people.

At their best, good operations design and AI do one thing: remove the obstacles to your people doing their best work. Too often, skilled people spend their days on work that wears them down, costs you money and adds nothing of value for the customer: chasing, amending, checking what’s already been checked.

Pulpo looks at where your people find satisfaction in what they do and how it connects to your customers. We help you recognise the human capabilities AI can’t replace, design roles around them, and build in the development and progression that give people something to work toward.

Create a place where people want to be, where they can take pride in their work because it has value, and your culture will take care of itself.

About

Over twenty years running group operations…

Rob Hannah, founder of Pulpo

…for three insurance and legal services companies — complicated, tightly regulated, low-margin work where the pressure never lets up. It was important work, and designed the right way, people found it genuinely rewarding. The sector never stopped changing, and when it did, the businesses and everyone in them had to change with it.

When I ran into people problems of my own, the resources to help were few and far between, so I enrolled on an MBA. Implementing what I learned created its own problems: most management theory assumes businesses behave rationally, and businesses full of people with different beliefs and opinions don't. Through trial and error, and a long detour into human psychology, I started seeing organisations as human systems — not just the processes that push work through, but the predictable ways people behave inside the structures they inhabit. The mystical veil over culture lifted, and meaningful change became possible.

We were competing for staff against companies offering unlimited holidays and total flexibility, and still the right people were easy to find. Voluntary attrition fell to around 4%, organisational knowledge compounded, and we began to achieve outcomes competitors could not match. My favourite part was people telling me, a while after joining, that it had changed their life — that friends and family had noticed they were happier.

Alongside the consultancy work, I'm currently studying AI implementation at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

I believe every business can do this. Pulpo exists to help them.

Not just good with change. An expert at it.

Most consultants fix the process or they fix the people. Pulpo works where the two collide to help you optimise your operation.

Why the octopus

Pulpo (POOL-po) is Spanish for octopus.

The octopus doesn't cope with change — it practises it. It changes colour, shape and behaviour to suit the moment, solves problems no octopus has ever met, and even rewrites its own neural instructions to fit new conditions. The only creature that routinely reprograms its own operating system.

Octopuses have three hearts.
So does your business: your people, your systems, and the technology you hand them. They operate more effectively when designed in unison.

Ready when you are.

Pulpo works out how your business actually runs — the human operating system underneath it, and how your people and your systems connect — and helps you enhance it. The first step is a half-hour conversation. No charge, no obligation and no pitch.

rob@pulpo.works

or call 0161 527 0766