Case Study · PR Agency
From 331 Hours to 15 Minutes
A UK PR agency spent weeks finding the right websites to contact. Now a computer has the list ready before the team gets in.
Follow the transformation- The business
- PR agency · ~15 employees · Digital PR teams
- The work
- AI build
- Delivery
- Built start to finish
01 / The starting point
331 hours of work. Two and a half hours of it counted.
This agency gets its clients written about on other people's websites. To do that, someone has to find the right sites and the right person to email. For every client it was the same run of jobs, all done by hand. Search Google. Look up who the client competes with. Check the sites. Hunt for an email address. Write the note. Send it. Seventeen steps, over and over, for every client on the books. We timed the whole run at 331 hours. Only two and a half of those hours made anything. The rest was clicking, copying, checking and waiting.
- Recorded baseline for the original workflow
- 331 hrs
- Of that time was doing anything useful
- <1%
- The part of the 331 hours that was real work
- 2.5 hrs
- Steps a person did by hand, every time
- 17+
Where the time went
Where the hours were going.
Opening Google pages one at a time and judging each one is slow, dull work. A computer can read a page and say whether it suits the client. So we gave it the reading to do. People deserve better than a day of clicking.
| Step | Recorded activity time |
|---|---|
| Look for sites we already work with | 2 min |
| Find the words people search for | 15 min |
| See who the client competes with | 20 min |
| Check who links to them | 2 min |
| Run the clever Google searches | 45 min |
| Go through the results, site by site | 45 min |
| Check we have not done this one before | 2 min |
| Look up local firms on Maps | 10 min |
| Hunt for the missing email addresses | 1 min |
| Write the email | 1h 30m |
| Pick the client page to point at | 5 min |
| Check the competitors again each week | 10 min |
| Send the list to the client to approve | 15 min |
| Load the list into the sending tool | 10 min |
| Check every name on the list | 5 min |
| Read every email before it goes | 5 min |
| Send it | 1 min |
These are individual activity timings from the original workflow. Adding them once gives 4 hours 43 minutes; they do not reproduce the full 331-hour baseline calculation. The fifteen-minute system run covers research and scoring. Email approval, outreach and securing links are separate work.
02 / The method
Understand it. Then build it.
Why we fix the work first
We drew the job out before we wrote a line of code. The drawing showed that almost none of those 331 hours was doing real work. Once you can see that, building the fix is the easy part.
- 01
We drew it
We wrote down every step of the job and timed each one. The whole run came to 331 hours. Only two and a half of them made anything.
- 02
We designed it
We used the seventeen-step map to choose what to automate. The system gathers the research and scores each website for how well it fits the client. People keep the outreach decisions.
- 03
We built it
Built and put to work. The clicking, the checking and the waiting now happen in one go, without anybody sat there.
- 04
It runs
The system reads and scores more than 3,000 pages in a fifteen-minute run. The team uses the results to choose prospects and handle outreach.
03 / What we built
What we put in its place.
- 01
It does the research
It pulls the data from every source at once, which takes out seven of the steps on its own.
- 02
It marks every website
Each site gets a score for how well it fits the client, so nobody sits there judging them one by one.
- 03
It reads thousands of pages
More than 3,000 pages read and scored in a single fifteen minute run.
| The work | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Research and scoring | Done by hand | Automated |
| Preparing the prospect list | People gather and assess the pages | 3,000+ pages read and scored in 15 min |
| Outreach and placement decisions | The team | The team |
04 / The result
Fifteen minutes, and the list is ready
- Saved in the first year
- £47k
- Duration of the research and scoring run
- 15 min
- Web pages read and scored in fifteen minutes
- 3,000+
- Chooses prospects and handles outreach decisions
- The team
The team no longer has to gather and score those pages one by one. It uses the prepared list to decide who to contact and spend more time on client work.
“You cannot hand a job to a computer until you have drawn it out. Drawing it out showed that less than one percent of the work was doing anything. Once you can see that, the build is the easy part.”
Sound familiar?
Different business. A familiar pattern?
- Does your team do the same run of clicks for every client, every time?
- Do you start the same research from scratch for each new client?
- Could you say how much of that work is actually worth doing?
- Have you automated bits of it, without ever writing down the whole job?
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A free 15-minute fit call to explore your workflow and discuss the workshop, including pricing.
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