Not enough of the right work coming in
Inquiries go cold while somebody drafts the perfect reply. Follow-up depends on a person remembering. What you know is genuinely good and completely invisible to anyone who has not met you yet.
About ValueLab
We have a fairly low tolerance for smart people doing low-value work.
ValueLab helps owners and professional service firms use AI where it can actually move the business forward.
That might mean more time for client work, faster replies to new inquiries, better follow-up, or more of the owner’s week spent growing the firm instead of running around inside it.
Manifesto
AI is not optional. Using it badly is.
AI is going to change how professional service firms compete. I am pretty certain about that.
The question is not whether you should use it. It is where.
Ask yourself: which firm would a client choose? The one that takes three days to reply, or the one that gets back in 30 minutes with a useful answer?
And which owner has the better chance of growing the business? The one spending Tuesday chasing updates, reviewing routine work and answering questions the team has asked before, or the one using that time to meet clients, make decisions and grow?
That gap is going to get wider.
But throwing AI at everything is not the answer either. A bad process with an AI agent attached is still a bad process. It just has a slightly more impressive demo.
Start with the problem. Find where time, money, clients or capacity are being lost. Then use AI where it actually helps.
AI first. Problem first-er.
How we work
Four steps, and AI is the fourth one.
Most AI projects start at step four, which is why so many of them stall in somebody’s Downloads folder.
01
Find the constraint
Is the business short of the right work coming in, or short of capacity to do the work it has? The answer changes everything after it.
02
Follow the work
How a job actually moves: who touches it, where it waits, what the client feels while it does. This is where time and margin leak.
03
Redesign it
Cut what does not need doing. Decide what still needs a person. Simplify before automating anything, because automating a mess just makes a faster mess.
04
Add AI where it pays
Build it on real work, keep human review where judgment and compliance belong, then make sure people still use it in week six.
Steps one to three are unglamorous and nobody sells a conference talk about them. They are also the reason the fourth one works.
Step one, in detail
Every business is stuck on one of two things. Which one is you?
Too much work for the people you have
Everything waits on one person’s review, and that person is usually you. The same questions come back weekly. Senior people spend the day preparing work rather than judging it.
Pointing AI at the wrong side is expensive theatre. There is an entire industry cheerfully selling demand-side tools to businesses with a supply-side problem, and it is the most common reason somebody decides AI does not work for them.
The practice
Two kinds of client, one approach.
The method does not change. What changes is who the bottleneck is: you, or the way the work moves through your team.
Owners who are the bottleneck
Six weeks, one to one, building the system that gets your week back and stops the business needing you for every decision, draft and approval.
Firms with a team to bring along
Strategy, systems and adoption for professional service firms, so the work gets faster without the standard lowering.
Who is behind it
Marta Hyland, founder.
I spent 16+ years fixing how work gets done inside SaaS, financial services and healthcare companies. I led teams of 30+, redesigned processes, rolled out new technology and ran large change programs across Dublin, London, Wrocław and Toronto.
One of those rollouts put new technology in front of 18,000 people, which meant hearing roughly 17,999 opinions about change management. It also taught me something I still believe: technology usually fails because nobody fixed the work around it first. The software just gets blamed afterwards.
That is how I approach AI too.
I am interested in the point where it stops being something you ask questions of and starts taking real work off your plate: preparing for a client meeting, checking a proposal, pulling together the background for a decision, drafting the follow-up.
Then the more useful question appears.
Why does this still need to come back to you at all?
I am not a technical AI guru, and I would rather you knew that upfront. I care far less about vector databases and knowledge graphs than I do about why good people are still spending hours on work that should take minutes.
The part that goes on the slide
Background, briefly.
- 16+ years improving how businesses actually run, a fair amount of it spent undoing something a vendor had already sold them
- FTSE 500 enterprises and medtech, then professional services firms small enough that everyone knows whose fault it is
- An enterprise-wide technology rollout across an 18,000-person global business
- Thousands of hours building, testing and breaking AI workflows myself, rather than advising from a safe distance
- AI governance work alongside legal and compliance teams in regulated environments
- MBA, Imperial College London
The rest of the bench
Engagements are not a solo act when they do not need to be. Jonathan Wharton brings fractional COO experience and pressure-tests where AI investment actually pays. Ed Hyland covers information security and AI governance, for the firms whose regulator will eventually ask.
Workshops and talks
We also do this in a room full of people.
Team workshops inside firms. Masterclasses for rooms full of owners. The odd keynote. Same approach as the client work: we start with what people actually do all day, and nobody leaves holding a deck full of AI vocabulary and no idea what to do on Monday.
Two truths and a lie
One of these did not happen. Care to guess?
I live in Victoria with my husband and Riker, our Irish setter, who holds strong views on walk timing, snack availability, and which meetings should have been emails. Beyond that, here are three claims.
I kept a pet tarantula as a teenager
She was quiet, low maintenance, and cleared a room faster than any icebreaker I have used since.
I have climbed in the Himalayas
Thin air, very good biscuits, and a view that makes your inbox seem like somebody else’s problem.
I have been on television explaining spreadsheets
Regional, brief, and the host kept calling them “the grids.” My finest work, arguably.
Bring your guess to the call. Get it right and I will admit which one it is, which is more than most consultants will tell you in a first meeting.
Curious whether this fits your business?
A short call to look at where your time or your team’s capacity is going, and whether there is something worth building.
Book a Fit Call