From founder-held to team-run.
How a 25-year family business redesigned the way work gets done – giving the team greater independence and the founders room to lead.
Client
EIR Building & Maintenance
Industry
Construction
Location
Sydney, NSW
Founders
Craig and Catherine Lacey
Team Size
Approx 25
Engagement
Retainer: Operational Redesign & Ongoing Support
4 → 9
Craig’s confidence in the business operating without depending on him.
60+ → ~40
Founder working hours per week, with regular Saturdays eliminated.
~50% lower
Approximate annual admin resourcing cost reported by Craig.
ISO achieved
The Challenge
A successful business still waiting on two people.
EIR had blue-chip clients, an experienced team and 25 years behind it. Yet critical decisions, exceptions and operating knowledge continued to flow through Craig and Catherine.
The complexity wasn’t the number of new starters-it was the number of different systems, inputs, forms and requirements that all flowed through one person.
“Everything was in my head. I liked that feeling of being in control. The only problem was the whole team would come to me to put out every fire. And I was holding everything up.”
Craig Lacey – Founder
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Core procedures and decision logic lived with the founders.
The team was repeatedly interrupted or delayed while waiting for answers.
Craig worked more than 60 hours a week, including regular Saturdays.
The business’s sale value and capacity for larger work were constrained by undocumented operations.
THE BREAKING POINT
Two outside perspectives exposed the same structural risk.
The accountant looked at future business value. Business coach Louise Mooney looked at founder dependence. Both reached the same conclusion: EIR needed operating capability that existed independently of Craig and Catherine.
THE ACCOUNTANT
An undocumented business would be valued accordingly. Without robust SOPs and digital systems, a future buyer could negotiate down the price because too much business value remained attached to the founders.
THE BUSINESS COACH
The business needed to function without them. Long hours, key-person risk and an inability to step away were not simply lifestyle issues. They were structural constraints.
The Approach
One operating model. Five connected phases.
Empire Ops captured how the business worked, redesigned the flow of work and embedded the new way of operating with the people who would use it.
01
Operational blueprint.
02
Ways of working.
03
Central operating system.
04
Embedding change.
05
Ongoing support.
CHALLENGES ALONG THE WAY
Built carefully, tested in practice
Making the investment case
Sarah needed to demonstrate to the partnership that operational improvement was a valuable use of limited funds.
“We had to be really mindful about our spend and convince our business partners that this was going to be valuable.”
Sarah Gleeson · Practice Owner
Pacing a larger transformation
Pulling on the original thread surfaced a full employee-lifecycle rebuild, so the team tested and refined the work in stages.
“It is important to go slow, pace ourselves and test these systems as we go.”
Alicia Wynder · Practice Manager
When a key person left, the work did not fall back into the founders’ heads.
“When someone signs a contract, it triggers all the other things to happen in our systems that I would do manually. I’m no longer having to copy and paste data or duplicate forms. Previously I had a mental checklist of all the things I needed to do for onboarding. Empire has automated this.
Onboarding is now 70–80% faster. What used to take hours is streamlined, automated, and just works. Email back-and-forth has halved, and it all just feels easier.”
What was once a manual, person-dependent process can now move from signed contract to operational readiness in as little as 24 hours.
Employment contract signed
Team records updated
Folders and files created
Forms pre-populated for signature
Stakeholders notified automatically
measurable Outcomes
The process no longer depends on one person
Alicia confidently took maternity leave whilst recruitment, onboarding and compliance continued to operate without her.
Task
Before
After
Change
Registrar onboarding (per doctor)
5–6 hours
1–2 hours
~70% faster
Annual registrar onboarding load
~24 hours
~6 hours
~18 hrs/year recovered
Email back-and-forth per applicant
High
50% less
−50%
Missed or duplicate forms
Common
Eliminated
Automated out of existence
A stronger candidate experience
A polished rural recruitment process that competes with metropolitan practices.
More valuable human effort
Alicia can focus on higher-value operational work without losing visibility.
A foundation for more
The same approach is expanding into nursing and administrative recruitment.
Could one of your workflows be redesigned the same way?
You don’t need to know the solution. Bring us the work that feels too manual, fragile or dependent on one person, and we’ll help you work out what should change.
The BUsiness Today
From one requested system to a more resilient practice.
Recruitment, onboarding and compliance now operate more consistently, with less manual effort and less reliance on one person.
Alicia has returned from maternity leave, with the redesigned HR lifecycle operating as intended throughout her absence. GMC is now extending the same approach across more of its…
Nursing recruitment
Administrative recruitment
Ongoing operational improvement