Little Annie

 
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800+

Appointments per month

3,000+

Customer email sends per month

67 hrs

Estimated time savings per month*

-80%

Errors arising from manual work

 

We first met Anna Munro of Little Annie photography during Malcolm’s wedding photography meeting. Through that initial catchup (that didn’t relate to Optimi at all!) we ended up working for Anna. When we first got in to exploring the Little Annie setup. we saw an innovative, fast-growing, studio photography startup. They had an urgent need to automate their manual email processes that were not handling their rapid growth.

We jumped on the opportunity to eliminate hours of manual data entry. We converted a lengthy, manual admin process into a simple, automated one. All the steps that Anna was having to do manually are now done automatically behind the scenes. And while we were making the process more efficient, we also built Anna a reliable customer database in a webapp called Airtable! Now Anna is free to focus on growing the business, and can leave all the admin pain behind her.

Client Painpoints

  • Huge admin workload, including large amounts of personalised customer emails being sent

  • Poor data integrity, with multiple sources of data across many systems all going out of date

  • Manual processes led to higher risk of data entry errors

  • Hard to email the right customers at the right time, due to lack of data integrity

  • Business growth being blocked by admin overload

OPPORTUNITIES FOUND

  • Automate the manual admin work sending emails, while retaining the personalisation that customers need

  • Create a single source of truth for customer information, giving peace of mind and the ability to reach the right people at the right time

  • Create a scalable system that can grow with the business, where more customers doesn't mean more admin time

  • Create simpler systems and processes so that the internal administrator is able to manage it themselves.

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“Optimi made it possible for us to handle 800+ appointments per month and 2500+ clients without really having to lift a finger.”
— Anna Munro, Founder, Little Annie

Tools used

 

 
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* Based on a conservative estimate of 5 minutes saved for 800 tasks per month

Our mission

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We’re not your typical consultants. Originally founded by Malcolm and some friends escaping from the rat race, we formed Optimi within Enspiral. Enspiral is a network of people wanting to make the world a better place, and we do too! It’s not big profits that get us going in the morning but helping people to solve their process problems. We particularly love working with businesses that have a social impact, since social impact makes the world a better place, and that’s what's important to us.  But, you won’t have an impact on the world if your business systems and processes are causing you pain! That’s where we hope to make a difference, with our expertise in connecting and configuring off the shelf web apps.

Our theory of change involves working with as many people as possible to make working life better for as many folks as we can. Although our skills are in technology and systems, we value humans and human interaction above all, so we design our systems and technologies to have real human impact.

Part of the way we see the business world improving, is making the world more equal through how businesses are run. So, we’re making our company worker-owned, with a focus on looking after our livelihood. Enspiral calls these things Livelihood pods. All of the team has a say in how we operate.
We think that contributes to a healthier, happier place to work.