Helping growing businesses improve retention, accelerate customer value, and build scalable customer operations that drive growth.
Customer Journey Mapping · Retention · Onboarding · Customer Value · Operational Efficiency · Scalable Delivery
"We need more headcount"
The capacity is usually already there. It's just going on the wrong things.
"I'm involved in every decision"
Growth capped by one person's availability is a structural problem.
"We treat every customer the same"
The most valuable relationships get whatever's left after the noisiest accounts are dealt with.
"Every customer gets a different experience, not by design"
No standardisation leads to inconsistent customer experience and outcomes.
"Customer churn is too high"
By the time it's obvious, the customer has already decided to leave.
"We keep starting things we don't finish"
Good intentions but distractions won. Change needs someone accountable for seeing it through.
Reduce manual work, rework, and operational friction to free up team capacity for higher-value work.
Design tiered service models that align effort with customer value, so the noisiest account stops consuming the most resource.
Create repeatable, documented ways of working that make quality consistent and remove ambiguity.
Build stronger onboarding, identify churn risk earlier, and design customer journeys that maximise long-term value.
Build reporting leaders trust and act on, driving the right decisions.
Map the full customer experience from first contact to continued value — identifying every friction point, adoption and value moment.
A flexible way to engage, depending on what the business needs.
A focused diagnostic that maps where your operation is absorbing cost it shouldn't be. Every finding is quantified — you'll know what each problem costs and what fixing it is worth.
A time-bound project to fix one specific, named problem — a broken onboarding process, missing KPI framework, or workflow that's absorbing time it shouldn't.
What a senior operations hire brings — without the recruitment risk, the onboarding lag, or the permanent overhead. Flexible scope, lower commitment, accountable for the work and the result.
From 15+ years leading customer and commercial operations inside a FTSE 50 enterprise and a £20M SaaS business.
The onboarding team was overwhelmed. We were pulling in staff from other markets to cover the load and the pressure was building to hire. Before doing that, I asked a simpler question: where is the team's time actually going?
A task-by-task analysis revealed that most of the effort was going on manual, low-value work that existed only because nobody had questioned it. Four automation improvements later, 120 hours per week were recovered and redirected to the work that actually mattered. The headcount request was never needed.
1 in 5 high-touch customers were churning early. Nobody could see why until it was too late, there was no way to see a customer disengaging before they'd already decided to leave.
I built a health scoring model drawing on CRM, product usage, finance and support data. Eight indicators tracked weekly, updated in 15 minutes, with a clear response for each and a cross-functional review built in. The team could see trouble coming and act before it became a retention crisis.
The business needed to do better by its most valuable customers. At the same time, the team couldn't sustain the volume at a single tier. Both problems pointed to the same fix.
I designed and implemented a three-tier delivery model — low, medium and high touch. This wasn't just a process change. Getting it to stick was as much about the team as the process. Presented to the CEO, approved, and rolled out globally department by department.
A new reseller signed in the Nordics. Post-contract, there was nothing — no operation, no processes, no onboarding flows, no CS capability. My job was to build it with them: product enablement, process design, onboarding structure, customer success framework. Built from scratch, in a market we'd never touched, with a team doing it for the first time.
Contract to first revenue: 3 months. Revenue targets hit within 6.
Retention was in the low 80s. With a team of 7 managing over 400 customers across diverse sectors, the problem wasn't capacity. Nobody had properly listened to what customers were experiencing and done something visible about it.
I started with a structured audit and direct conversations with a sample of the base. Categorised what I heard. Prioritised by commercial impact. Re-designed the engagement programme through a tiered structure to ensure customers received value. Within 12 months: retention moved from the low 80s to 90%. CSAT from 6.5 to 8.3. £1M expansion revenue from the same customer base.
Defined by situation, not sector.
The business runs through you. The work is about changing that.
Revenue is moving faster than the operation that has to support it.
Something has shifted — product, market, leadership — and the operation needs to catch up.
Steve Ashwood is a customer operations consultant with 15+ years built inside FTSE 50 enterprise and scaling SaaS businesses. He's led customer operations at scale, built CS functions from scratch, and managed £4.5M ARR customer portfolios. Now he works independently with growing businesses who need that level of experience without the full-time cost.
Connect on LinkedInThe starting point is a 30-minute diagnostic call. A focused conversation about where the business is, where it's trying to get to, and where the commercial friction is.
Book a Diagnostic Call If I don't think I can genuinely help, I'll say so on that call, before anything is committed.