The architecture studio had no obvious problems. Four licensed architects, one administrative coordinator. A steady pipeline of residential renovation projects and one commercial fit-out per quarter. Good clients, largely repeat business, clean contractual relationships with the specialists they worked with regularly.
When the founding architect contacted us, her description of the problem was vague in the way that well-run businesses often are: "We spend too much time on things that are not architecture."
This is one of the most common things we hear. It is almost always true. What varies is which things, and how much. And whether the cost has ever been made visible enough to act on.
The workflow map
Over three days, we traced every recurring administrative process in the studio: what triggered it, who handled it, how long it realistically took, and what happened when it went wrong. We looked at eleven recurring workflows in total. Three met our threshold for detailed cost analysis: they were frequent enough to matter, they required skilled or semi-skilled time to complete, and they had no current automation in place.
The other eight were either too infrequent, already handled acceptably, or too dependent on judgment to be meaningfully automated. We noted them in the report and did not recommend acting on them. A Clarity Scan is not a case for doing everything. It is a case for doing the right things first.
Workflow 1: Weekly project status reports
Every Friday, the two junior architects spent approximately 45 minutes each compiling status updates for active projects: current progress against timeline, open decisions pending from clients, items waiting on specialist input. And formatting them into a PDF sent to each client by end of day.
The reports were not optional. Clients expected them. In a competitive market where residential renovation projects run long and clients grow anxious, the weekly update had become a meaningful differentiator: the studio's clients knew, every Friday, exactly where their project stood. The reports were good. They were also entirely manual.
Every piece of information in each report already existed in the studio's project management system. The Friday afternoon was a manual act of transcription: pulling data that was current and accessible into a format that could be emailed.
Two junior architects. 45 minutes each. 46 working Fridays per year. At CHF 140 per hour: the studio's blended billable rate for junior architect time.
Annual cost: 69 hours × CHF 140 = CHF 9,660.
Workflow 2: Subcontractor coordination
Each project engaged two to four specialist subcontractors: structural engineers, energy consultants, occasionally a landscape architect or heritage specialist. Scheduling site visits and confirming availability was handled by whoever was leading the project. A sequence of emails, sometimes a call, always a manual back-and-forth that could run across two to three days before a single confirmation was secured.
The studio averaged 3.2 subcontractor confirmations per week across its active projects. Each one took approximately 35 minutes of architect time from first contact to confirmed booking. None of it was billable. No client was paying for the back-and-forth. It was absorbed into project time and treated as overhead, which meant it was not tracked, not measured, and not examined.
3.2 confirmations per week × 35 minutes × 46 working weeks. At CHF 140 per hour.
Annual cost: 86 hours × CHF 140 = CHF 12,040.
Workflow 3: Invoice preparation
Invoices were prepared by the administrative coordinator, working from handwritten time logs kept by each architect and a Word template updated for each client. The coordinator would cross-reference each time log against the project fee schedule and the agreed scope before entering figures. With eight to ten active projects at any time, month-end billing consistently took a full day: sometimes more, when time logs were incomplete or entries were ambiguous.
Eight hours per month × 12 months. At CHF 65 per hour: the coordinator's effective hourly rate at their annual salary.
Annual cost: 96 hours × CHF 65 = CHF 8,320.
The total
| Workflow | Hours / year | Rate (CHF/h) | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly project status reports | 69 h | 140 | CHF 9,660 |
| Subcontractor coordination | 86 h | 140 | CHF 12,040 |
| Invoice preparation | 96 h | 65 | CHF 8,320 |
| Total recoverable | 251 h | — | CHF 30,020 |
We assessed 81% of this as recoverable through automation. Accounting for process complexity, integration requirements, and the realistic fraction of each workflow that still benefits from human judgment. Target saving: CHF 24,316 per year.
What was built
The status reports are now generated automatically each Thursday evening. The system pulls current data from the project management tool: task status, open decisions, next milestones. And populates the report template for each active project. A draft lands in the project lead's inbox on Friday morning for a three-minute review before dispatch. The Friday afternoon is free.
Subcontractor coordination moved to a shared scheduling interface with automated confirmation messages. Each specialist maintains a linked availability calendar. When a site visit is needed, the project lead selects a window and the system handles the outreach and confirmation. Average time to confirmed booking: six minutes, down from thirty-five.
Invoice preparation was connected directly to a digital time-logging system the studio adopted as part of the Sprint. Time entries flow automatically into the invoice template. The coordinator now reviews and approves rather than builds. Month-end billing: approximately fifty minutes.
Sprint cost (CHF 6,400. Break-even) fourteen weeks.
The number that does not appear in the table
At the debrief session following go-live, the founding architect raised something that was not captured anywhere in the Opportunity Matrix.
"I don't need four more billing hours on a Friday. I need four more thinking hours. Those are not the same thing, and the thinking hours are harder to replace."
Founding architect · Bern · Residential and commercialThe Friday afternoon that the status report preparation used to consume was not, in practice, going to be filled with additional billable work. It was going to be used for the kind of work that does not have a line in a spreadsheet: reviewing a project with fresh eyes, thinking about a client's brief at the end of the week rather than the beginning, leaving the studio without the weight of unfinished administrative tasks sitting above the weekend.
This is not in the ROI calculation. It is also not nothing.
The studio returned six months later for a second Sprint. The founding architect said she had begun to see the practice differently since the first one: not because the numbers had changed, but because the week had changed shape.
Wondering if this applies to your business? Ask Kai. It knows the details.
Find out what your workflows are actually costing.
The Clarity Scan maps every recurring process above a threshold of frequency and consequence, costs each one, and ranks them by recovery potential. The report is concrete, the numbers are specific, and the analysis belongs to you regardless of what you decide to do with it.