Issue 22 - Winter 2025

James Rowell on The Red Sofa

Interviewer: Good morning and welcome to the Red Sofa. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming James Rowell from Advent Management onto the Red Sofa, who helps businesses to improve operations to delivering constant service. Hi, James and welcome.

James: Thank you for inviting me here. It’s a pleasure.

Interviewer: So James, please give us a bit of background to Advent Management.

James: Well, it’s about process design and when I think about it, when I was even a boy, I was thinking about processes, watching my mum, setting, washing on the line and making sure it’s straight and catching the wind just like a yachtsman might do with their sails.

More recently I was a university lecturer teaching operations and process management and so on. I had spent some time in Istanbul and then came back to the UK and decided that I needed a new career.

So I decided that my focus was going to be on process design and helping companies improve how they deliver service to their clients and customers.

Interviewer: Advent language uses the strap line ‘Process Performance Profitability’. This is a two part question. What type of businesses tend to benefit from your services? And how do businesses identify a need for change?

James: Gosh, that’s a tricky one. It’s quite a wide one. First of all, every company, every organisation has processes, whether they be big or small, one solo entrepreneur through to a corporate organisational processing and making things happen.

Some of that happens internally, how they work with their people and what they do inside their business operation. And obviously that impacts either directly or indirectly on their customers and clients and that’s why I think it’s important for them.

Can you remind me the second part of the question?

Interviewer: How do businesses identify a need for change?

James: Thank you. That’s a really good question too. Sometimes it’s because they’ve realised that they’re in a chaotic situation and they’re not servicing their customer very well at all and really need help to sort it out. They haven’t got time to think about it because they’re doing the job other times and other clients have been where they’ve been in a growing situation and realise that their processes won’t support the growth that they have. It would mean that they have, for example, more administrative people to manage the volume and that’s not going to be useful or profitable, use that word. Over time as they grow and that’s when they might call me in.

Interviewer: Could you provide us with a couple of scenarios where you’ve assisted businesses with change? From looking at what their initial inquiry was and the service/strategy that Advent Management undertook and how this benefited the businesses and their customers.

James: I think I’ll start with a fairly early project I worked on, it was a small company, they would perceive that their business was going to be growing, it had grown already and they wanted to review the processes there, which is one of the things we would do as, you know, reviewer processes, because they perceived an issue with them growing as they planned and realising that they just need more staff to manage it all or administrate it all and realise that that wasn’t going to be useful and effective. So I was brought in to overview, oversee and audit their processes.

One of the areas that we looked at was a problem they had between when they were recruiting staff and it was a people business. So they took too long between identifying the candidate that they wanted to offer to since the interview and realising that they were losing candidates because it was too long and the person had found another role in another company.

So that was one of the things we sat down and looked at it with them, went through it. They had data in different systems, which is part of the problem. But there are other bits of that process and we redesigned that with them.

But that sort of highlights the areas we work. We do a review and audit of the operation. We do design or might need to do some research sometimes, but very rarely training in things.

A different project which was perhaps bigger was with a company that stored product on behalf of their clients. It came in and out of their facility and this is a very big review across the whole of their business, from manufacturing, design, printing, project management, storage, etc. But they had a problem in the warehouse where they’re storing their customers materials such that they had really poor access to it.

And one of the things that was really a fairly simple change, but very effective, was to enable them to access those products much more simply. I won’t go into the details here. The effect of that principally was to halve the time of accessibility to their client product and ship it out to them when it was needed.

But one of the things there was short of space in this particular function and that would solve the problem of having too much material standing around in the warehouse, but get in the way of any activities that are going on. So that was a really effective one and I think that that would enable them to service their customers, which is very timely, based much more accurately and successfully and not lose things in the meantime. I mean, losing the sense of we can’t find it, it’s there somewhere, but we haven’t got it out yet.

Interviewer: On your website and marketing materials, you mention a lot about businesses ‘customers’ and that your strategies and processes are all about creating change to support them. Can you develop into this a bit more and why business should always consider improvements to processes to support their customer needs?

James: Well, that’s a really good, good question. Quite a big question really. Prices are important because that’s how you deliver service whether it be directly to the customer or a number of activities inside your business, as I’ve mentioned example earlier, that helps you smoothly run the operation and deliver good service to your clients. So it’s all intertwined in that sense by having good processes and well defined people know what to do and how to do a good job. And because of that they feel more motivated to be able to do a good job because they know they in their role in their task they can be successful clients like consistent service because they don’t care if John or Sally or Shafiq serve them that day, it’s as good as the day before. And that brings them back and gives them the possibility of more loyal customers who of course come back and buy more, buy more service from and add to the profitability.

I mean other reasons why companies come to me is because maybe there’s some change in their business could be changed for ownership or they bought a subsidiary company for example and they want to tie them together. But also as we know technology changes and we need to encompass that and how that might affect processes, that things they’re doing things become unnecessary, redundant activities with processes we know. And also we know that customers change, they demand different things and may be delivered in a different way or the volumes might change and all that might come back and relate to how I in my company, the managing director, how they deliver service to their clients and to their customers.

And I think we’re in a world where we know that things are going on, we need to and in general word improve things so that we can address that effectively as ourselves and be more efficient. So this is why it comes back to process, doing it well and knowing what you’re doing and how to do it improves performance, reduces costs. And if you’re reducing costs, hopefully you should be increasing your profitability so that you can move forward effectively.

Interviewer: That’s great, thanks for your time, James. That’s James from Advent Management helping you improve processes, performance and profitability.

James: Thank you very much.

Watch the full interview here