A four-week first phase. A working tool you keep. No further commitment.
You've spent thirteen years building Tannery. The systems you bought to run it haven't kept up. Stock counts are done on paper and typed into Magnum hours later — by which time the numbers have already drifted. Damaged stock has no formal record. The credit accounts work, but reconciling what customers have actually paid versus what the system says takes Hassan hours each week. Your supplier data lives in the Magnum vendor's head, not yours.
None of this is broken in a dramatic way. It just quietly costs money — stock you can't account for, customers waiting at the till, time spent chasing numbers, sales lost to slow service. Worked through carefully, we put the running cost of these inefficiencies at roughly £21,000–£42,000 a year. That's not a guess. It's based on operational ratios for trade-supply businesses your size, and on what Hassan has been seeing on the floor.
The Magnum vendor's quote to fix even part of this was £80,000. We don't think you should spend that, and we're not asking you to. We're proposing something much smaller, much faster, and entirely under your control.
After Phase 1 you decide whether there's a Phase 2. If you say no, you keep the stock-counting tool. You keep the cleaned product database. You owe nothing more. That's the deal — explicit, in writing, before any work starts.
Phase 1 is built so the work after it is small and additive. You get to decide one step at a time, at a similar price each time. No long contracts, no big-bang commitment.
Ilya has been Hassan's go-to technical person for the best part of seven years. This isn't a pitch from a stranger. The technical work is delivered by someone Hassan already knows and trusts, working directly with him on a problem he understands inside out. You're being asked to trust Hassan's judgement on that — not ours.
A "yes" from all three of you, and a 30-minute call to confirm the scope, agree which staff member will trial the tool first, and start a four-week clock. No payment until the contract is signed; the £4,500 is split into two — half at signature, half on delivery.