Who we work with
Established, owner-led UK businesses, typically with 5–50 staff and at least ten years of trading. The common thread is a specific operational problem, usually time lost to manual work that never quite gets fixed, and an owner willing to involve the people who do that work.
You don’t need to be technical. Everything we build and recommend is explained in plain language.
Problems we help with
- Work that depends on someone remembering to do it.
- Hours lost to chasing, re-keying and reconciling between systems.
- Not being able to see the numbers that matter until it’s too late to act on them.
- A previous AI pilot that went nowhere, or not knowing where to start.
We start with the business problem, not the technology. Sometimes the answer is an AI agent. Sometimes it’s a dashboard, an approval step or a decision not to automate at all.
How an engagement works
Before anything else, there’s a thirty-minute conversation with a founder. Then three steps, each with a clear end point. You can stop after any of them.
- Blueprint: AI strategy consulting. Two weeks, fixed fee. We map how work moves, find where AI would move a number you care about, and write down what not to automate.
- Build: AI implementation. About six weeks. The system the Blueprint calls for, with approvals, spend caps and a log of every action from day one.
- Embed: AI adoption and change. Ongoing, until your team runs and improves the system without us.
What it costs
Blueprint is a fixed fee. Before any work starts, the proposal sets out what you’ll receive, what transfers to you and which third-party services carry on running afterwards. We’ll talk through cost on the first call.
How to choose an AI and business consultancy
Whoever you work with, these questions are worth asking:
- Who does the work? Will the people who scope it be the people who build it?
- Will they tell you what not to automate? A good plan stops bad projects as well as starting good ones.
- What controls come with it? Approvals, spend limits and a record of every action should be there from the start.
- Who owns what’s built? You should know before work starts what transfers to you and what keeps running afterwards.
- What happens after handover? Ask how your team will be trained and who will own each workflow.
Evidence
Our published work covers six anonymised engagements, including sales visibility for a UK logistics business, invoice collections for a service business and job profitability for a creative agency. Each should be read in its own context; none is a promise of the same result elsewhere.
Who we are
Woodlark is founder-led. Trent Peek and Richard Ardis scope, build and lead every engagement. We’re based in Nottingham and work with clients across the UK, on site and remotely. Our company facts are published in full.
When to choose someone else
If you want a single off-the-shelf tool set up, or you already have a scoped plan and only need extra developers, we’re probably not the right fit. If a Blueprint isn’t the right next step, we’ll say so on the first call and tell you what is.