A practical, people-centred approach to improving how work gets done
Anthony Collins, Founder,
Work Better Studio
As businesses evolve and teams grow, processes can become more complex and ownership fragmented - increasing costs, reducing employee productivity, and often hurting customer satisfaction and other key metrics.
Work Better Studio provides hands-on advisory support to help business leaders stabilise operations, simplify how work flows, and build the internal capability to keep improving.
This is a practical, people-centred approach to improving how work gets done.
Who’s this for?
Advisory support is typically for founders and leadership teams in SME service and manufacturing businesses and public-sector organisations that depend on human-led processes such as finance, customer service, sales, administration, HR and general management.
This work can have a particularly deep impact when leaders are:
Under pressure to hire new staff
Missing sales, operations or customer service targets
Considering external investment, development grants or sale of their business
Feeling their best people are buried in low-value work
Your team may have a clear sense that something isn’t working as it should - but not yet a shared understanding of what to fix first.
How it works
Advisory work is tailored to the situation, but typically involves:
Stabilise - understand what’s really happening.
Establish a shared way of thinking about improvement.
Map the current state to create visibility.
Identify what your customers really value.
Simplify - eliminate waste and make work flow.
Work with your teams to pinpoint bottlenecks and friction points.
Agree which steps should be removed or streamlined based on customer value.
Strengthen - build repeatable ways of working better.
Map future state with clear ownership of each process.
Define simple working procedures and equip your teams to measure and improve performance.
Sustain - lock in improvements and culture.
Use visual controls and regular reviews to stay on course.
Recognise progress and help your teams share their learning to encourage further improvements.
How this is different
Our goal is not a report, training workshops or “Lean transformation” - it’s to make real, long-term improvements to a couple of key processes and use those improvements as a base for developing your team’s continuous improvement skills and culture.
Our approach:
Is grounded in real operational leadership experience, not consulting or academic theory
Sets out to make work easier, improving how work flows - not working harder or cutting jobs.
Uses customer value as the test - work that doesn’t contribute to customer value is questioned, simplified, or removed.
Is designed to build capability so teams are equipped to stay on course and improve their own work over time.
Improvement is treated as a management system, not a toolkit.
Experience and context
Work Better Studio was founded by Anthony Collins, a recognised practitioner in applying continuous improvement principles to real-world service and office environments.
Anthony has spent decades leading complex service operations and working directly with organisations across manufacturing, services, and the public sector.
His work has been recognised internationally, including speaking at conferences and events on Lean and productivity and hosting best practice visits in Ireland and France on behalf of Enterprise Ireland and the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation.
Start a conversation
If you’d like to explore whether advisory support could help your organisation work better, get in touch for a no obligation chat with Anthony.
Advisory engagements start with a small number of focused conversations to understand the organisation’s current challenges and agree what “better” would actually look like. From there, support can range from short, focused interventions to longer-term advisory relationships.