They wanted higher earnings, but their team was already turning work away.
The sponsor and management wanted the company to reach $5M in EBITDA ahead of a future sale. They were considering more selling capacity and an acquisition, but each growth plan depended on the same authors who already produced the company's research.
Those authors wrote subscription reports, delivered custom studies, and met with clients to explain the findings. Each new client or higher subscription tier needed more of their time, so the company had started declining or delaying custom requests it couldn't fit into the calendar. There was business to win, but the team needed room to deliver it.
The sponsor mainly saw bookings, pipeline, renewals, and margin in the board pack. Work the company couldn't accept wasn't visible in the same way, so the commercial picture left out part of the problem. Before recommending more sales capacity, we looked at what kept the authors from finishing more work.
Their experts were rebuilding old research when they could have been serving clients.
We studied the authors' work, checked the historical research files, and reviewed the requests sales had declined or delayed. What we found was that the company had demand for more studies, but the authors needed to deliver them were spending time reconstructing research the company already owned.
A report often needed to compare a new survey with earlier waves of research. The questions and customer groups had changed over time, and the files didn't carry one consistent record of those changes. Before an author could explain a trend, they had to work out whether the numbers from different years were actually comparable.
That work came back with each new wave. Hiring more authors would add capacity, but it would also give more people the same history to reconcile. And a drafting assistant reading the existing reports would still need a reliable way to distinguish a real trend from a change in the underlying definitions.
We recommended rebuilding that shared history first, then using it to support the authors' analysis and drafting. The sponsor and management agreed to that route because it addressed the repeat work behind the capacity problem.
We gave authors more time for analysis and clients by reducing repeat preparation.
We built a shared record that connected each question, research wave, customer group, and result to its source. That meant authors could start from reconciled history instead of rebuilding it for each report, with the underlying data and definitions available when they needed to check a comparison.
Reliable data was only part of the job. The experienced authors also held the company's rules for deciding which comparisons were valid and how findings should become recommendations. We worked with them to write those rules down, then used them to build checks into the drafting assistant.
The assistant prepared the first draft, trend tables, and supporting files, giving authors a starting point they could review against the evidence. They could spend more of their time interpreting findings and helping clients use them because less of the job involved reconstructing history and preparing material by hand. The authors still made the changes the research needed and signed off each finished report.
We connected the workflow to the existing subscriber platform too, so the company gained the new production capability while keeping the delivery channel its clients already used.
They could accept more custom work and sell new briefs from research already paid for.
With less repeat work holding up production, the sales team could return to opportunities the company had been turning away. They resumed quoting custom studies with delivery dates the operating team could support, turning the capacity we'd freed into work clients would pay for.
The same foundation gave the company another way to earn from research it had already paid to collect. It introduced a paid tier of client-specific briefs, using the existing research to answer a particular client's questions. The assistant prepared the first draft for an author to review, so the company could sell a more tailored result without commissioning fresh fieldwork for every brief.
We made those extra deliverables practical by changing the production work behind them, and the client's team took them to market. The company could now grow through both work it had previously declined and a new offer built on the research it already had.
They surpassed their earnings goal without adding authors.
The company earned $1.6M more in EBITDA and brought in $2.9M more revenue in the 12 months after we finished the engagement, all with the same author team. A partner confirmed those results in a later conversation: EBITDA had risen from $3.6M to $5.2M, and revenue from $16.4M to $19.3M. We completed the engagement in July 2025.
They'd wanted to reach $5M in EBITDA and had surpassed that goal by $200,000. The CFO credited the production changes and the new brief tier with most of the earnings increase, alongside contractual price increases that were already part of the business.
The authors' extra capacity had become custom studies the company could deliver and new briefs it could sell. That was how changing the work behind the reports helped the business grow beyond what the same author team had been able to produce before.
How the data and drafting workflow worked.
For the data structure, review checks, publishing workflow, and handover, read the technical companion.
We taught their team to keep using the system as new research arrived.
New research would keep arriving, so the team needed to know how to keep it usable as well as how to work with the assistant. We trained the operating team to add research and resolve changed definitions, and taught authors how to review the output against their own methods. They had procedures for keeping new work moving through the system after the initial build.
They'd come to us looking for a way to grow, and we found that their experts were spending time rebuilding the information they needed to do their jobs. We made that information usable, built the assistant around their judgment, and taught the team to operate it. As a result, the company could accept more work and sell more value from its existing research, while its authors had more time for the analysis and client conversations that made that research worth buying.
If you’re trying to grow your own business, start with your goal, look at what it'll take to achieve it, and then identify what's keeping you from taking action. Just remember that every business is different and that rebuilding research history by hand was just their bottleneck and it might not be yours.
We helped this research company add $1.6 million in EBITDA in the 12 months after delivery by finding and removing their bottleneck.
If you’re a portfolio-company CEO and want to grow your business without each growth plan overloading the same specialists, we’ll identify the biggest bottleneck standing in your way, build the plan to remove it, and implement it in eight weeks* or less - guaranteed or we continue to work for free and you don’t pay.
Find my bottleneck* Eight-week delivery, or twelve weeks when substantial data foundations are required, as agreed before work begins. If a covered stage fails its agreed benchmarks, we provide up to four additional weeks of remedy work at no charge, then waive or refund that stage’s fee if it still fails. Successfully delivered stages remain payable. Agreed client-caused delays pause the clock. Delivery guarantee terms.