For founders of growing SaaS companies and agencies
Could your business run for a month without you?
In 90 days, it can. Even if everything runs through you today.
“Talking to Stefan unlocked things in my brain that I forgot I had in there. It’s been extremely important in prioritizing my next steps.”
Dear founder,
Is everything still landing on your desk? Would a month away mean a month of catching up?
If so, this could be the most useful page you read this week.
Switch off for a month, and a lot would stop. Deals stall. Invoices sit unpaid. A renewal slips past without a call. And on day 2, someone messages you anyway.
It doesn’t have to work like that.
Nobody knows your business like you do. But when you’re inside it every day, it’s hard to see what’s holding it back.
My name is Stefan Manku. For 10 years I’ve worked alongside founders. I find what keeps them tied to everything, then build the fix, so the business can run without them.
You can start with a free 1-hour Bottleneck Call. You’ll leave knowing your biggest bottleneck, and where I’d start, whether we work together or not.
Why everything still lands on your desk
You know these moments:
- You join a sales call, and the prospect mentions they’ve just raised money. You didn’t know.
- A great call on Tuesday. By Friday, the follow-up still hasn’t gone out. By the time it does, they’re talking to someone else.
- 2 weeks before renewal, a customer asks to “talk about price”. So you knock 10% off to keep them.
- £30,000 of invoices are overdue. Money you’ve earned and can’t use, and you’re the one chasing it.
- You’ve read 80 CVs this week for 1 role.
- A client asks for “one small extra”, and your team does it for free. Again.
- The same problem your team fixed last month is back on your desk.
Your team is good. But the day-to-day swamps your senior people, and not everyone knows how to build the fix.
So they patch each problem as it lands, and it comes back next week.
And you pick it up.
It gets worse when something forces the issue. A holiday you’ll work through. A new hire on Monday. More customers than your team can absorb. A quarter where growth stalls, and you can’t see why.
The problems nobody is watching
Most of what leaks out of a business makes no noise.
Here’s an example:
At one company I work with, a customer’s integration could quietly stop working. Nobody found out until the customer complained, or left.
So I sat with the customer success team and agreed what trouble looks like. Then I built a daily check on every customer account.
In its first 15 weeks, it raised 183 alerts across 78 customers. 9 in 10 were real issues. And 6 in 10 flagged something the account manager didn’t already know.
Some of what it caught:
- A customer rebuilt their website, and the integration vanished with it.
- 2 customers switched to a new partner, and the tracking broke.
- A customer changed their site code, which broke the integration.
- A key link stopped working.
None of these sent an error message. The money stopped coming in.
One account manager’s reply, when an alert landed: “Who knew? I’ll reach out.”
The problems were there all along. Nobody was watching, because it was nobody’s job.
Your business has its own version. Try this:
- How many deals stalled last quarter, waiting on a follow-up? What were they worth?
- How many customers left last year without warning?
- How much is overdue right now?
Add up your answers. That’s roughly what staying as you are costs you. The Deep Dive works it out properly, line by line.
Now picture Monday morning with those leaks fixed.
Imagine a week where nothing waits for you
Finding and winning customers
- You walk into a sales call already knowing they hired 3 people last month.
- Tuesday’s follow-up is in their inbox before you’ve left the room.
- A lead who went quiet in March replies to a nudge you never wrote.
Onboarding
- A customer signs on Friday. By Monday they’ve met their contact and know their start date.
- Nobody asks you “where are we with the new client?”
Keeping customers
- You hear an account is cooling 3 months before renewal, not 2 weeks.
- Renewal day comes, and the paperwork is already done.
- A customer’s integration breaks at 2am. Their account manager knows by 9.
Growing accounts
- Sales gets a tap on the shoulder when a customer is ready to buy more.
- A client asks for “one small extra”, and gets a polite price, without you.
Cash and admin
- An invoice goes 7 days late. You only hear about it once it’s paid.
- A new hire’s laptop, logins and first week are ready before they arrive.
You and your team
- Your team makes the calls that used to queue for you.
- You read 5 CVs for a role, not 80.
- You take 2 weeks off, and clear your inbox in a morning.
Why the obvious fixes don’t stick
You’ve probably tried to fix this already. One founder put it like this, in the brief he sent me:
“In the past, the VAs I’ve had end up simply being another person who I have to manage and direct. I’m hoping for someone who can keep ME on task, take things off my plate, and make sure I’m doing what I’m supposed to. This piece is honestly the most important.”
He’d hired help and ended up with one more person to manage. An assistant needs a system to work in. Without one, every task still started with him.
Most advisers hand you a plan and leave. You carry it out, on top of everything else.
A course hands you templates to run alongside your day job.
AI on a messy process gets you to the wrong place faster.
Each one works on where it hurts. None looks at where it starts.
Before I worked in startups, I was a physiotherapist. Physio teaches you that pain doesn’t always start where you feel it. A painful arm can come from the shoulder, or even the neck.
Treat only the arm, and the pain keeps coming back.
Businesses work the same way:
- It looks like you need more leads. But if customers are quietly leaving out the back, more leads only fill a leaking bucket.
- It looks like you need another salesperson. But win 1 in 3 deals instead of 1 in 5, and 30 leads bring you 10 customers instead of 6.
- It looks like you need a bigger overdraft. But the cash is often already yours, sitting in invoices nobody has chased.
- It looks like you need to hire. But if your team never bills a fifth of its hours, you’re already paying for people you’re not charging for.
A business runs as a set of systems, the same 6 you’ll see below. Fix the system, and the symptom goes.
So you need someone who finds the cause, builds the fix, owns it until it works, then hands it over. Here’s how the usual options compare.
Where I look, and the questions I ask
I start before your customer has even heard of you, with how you find them, and follow them all the way to renewal. Then I look at what sits behind it: the admin that keeps it running, and you and your team.
In every area, I ask the same 3 questions:
- What lands on you? The calls, questions and decisions that wait for you.
- What’s done by hand, again and again?
- Who owns it? By name, not “the team”.
Then I dig into each area. A taste of the questions:
Your customer’s journey
1. Finding and winning customers
- Where do your best customers come from, and could you get more of them on purpose?
- How many sales calls do you still take yourself each week?
- What does your team know about a prospect before the call starts?
- When a deal goes quiet, who notices first?
- How long does it take to get a proposal out?
2. Onboarding
- What happens in the 48 hours after someone signs?
- How much of what sales promised reaches the people delivering it?
- How long until a new customer sees their first result?
- Who chases the customer for what you need from them?
3. Keeping customers
- How do you know a customer is unhappy before they tell you?
- Who owns each customer, by name?
- When does the work on a renewal start?
- Which questions do customers ask again and again?
4. Growing accounts
- When did anyone last ask your best customers what else they need?
- Who decides when to offer an upgrade?
- When did you last review your prices?
- How many new customers came from referrals last year, and did you ask for them?
What holds it all together
5. Cash and admin
- How much is overdue right now, and who chases it?
- How does extra work get from a conversation onto an invoice?
- How many hours a week go on booking calls and chasing documents?
- Where does someone copy information from one tool to another?
- Which reports does someone still build by hand?
6. You and your team
- What came to you last week that someone else could have decided?
- Which problems keep coming back?
- If someone started on Monday, what would they own by Friday?
- How many of your hours does it take to fill 1 role?
- Where does your week really go?
The areas connect. A customer who leaves often started with a rushed handover from sales. An invoice that goes unpaid is often from a customer who never saw the value.
That’s why I look at all 6, not just the one that hurts.
A Deep Dive works through around 60 questions like these.
3 more systems I’ve built, and what changed
Knowing what buyers say about competitors
I turned a team’s AI call summaries into a monthly report on every competitor, built from what prospects and customers say on sales calls.
A second report shows whether the team’s pitch is landing with buyers.
The team now hears things it didn’t already know, without anyone digging, and gets fresh ideas for what to pitch, and how.
The weekly update nobody has to write
A growing team had more in Slack than anyone could keep up with. By Wednesday, nobody could find the week’s news.
I built a newsletter that pulls it all together from Linear, Slack, HubSpot and Airtable, every Friday at 5pm.
AI writes it using a style guide, so it reads like a well-written note from a colleague.
It replaces about 90 minutes a week of gathering and writing, and saves everyone else the scroll back through Slack.
Hundreds of CVs, read in minutes
Every new role brought hundreds of applications. Reading one properly takes a few minutes, and it kept landing on senior people.
I built an AI tool that reads every CV against the role’s scorecard and pulls out the evidence, so the team starts from an organised list with the reasons attached. People still make every decision.
Hundreds of CVs processed in minutes, instead of hours of reading.
Who you’ll work with, and why you can trust me
You’ll work with me directly.
For 10 years, I’ve worked inside fast-growing companies, alongside the founders who built them. I’ve seen what holds a business back from the inside, more than once.
- Head of Operations at Gocertify, a verification technology company working with more than 500 brands.
- Chief of Staff at Xihelm, a venture-backed robotics startup from Entrepreneur First, building computer-vision robots that pick tomatoes. I was an extension of the founder, among AI engineers, many with PhDs.
- Operations Manager at Henchman (now Captain), a London on-demand delivery service and the software behind it.
- Founder of QuickHire VA, which has helped more than 114 founders hire great assistants. I’ve vetted over 3,289 remote workers along the way.
- 1-to-1 sessions with 62 founders and CEOs, helping them work out where they were stuck.
- Years as a volunteer listener on crisis helplines. That’s where I learned the skill you’ll get the most from: asking the questions that get to the real problem.
- Physiotherapist in the NHS and private practice, before all of this.
Working with people that sharp teaches you to make complicated things simple. That’s what you get.
It started with a habit. When a CEO I worked for was stretched, I’d listen, then ask questions until the real problem came out.
It was rarely the one on his list. Often, the answer came to him within minutes.
Now I do the next part too. I build the fix, and hand it to the team.
I’ve run businesses myself, so I know what it’s like when everything lands on you. When I take something on, I own it from start to finish. You get:
- You always know where things stand. I keep you updated as things move, so you never have to ask.
- A plan for how the change lands: who it affects, how they’ll take it, and what they need to use it.
- A proper handover, with 30 days of fixes included if anything breaks.
How I work:
- I never assume. If something isn’t clear, I’ll ask.
- You know your business best. My job is to help you see it differently.
- I listen to understand, not to reply.
- I build the smallest system that does the job, so your team uses it.
At QuickHire VA, the best placements had a system to step into, or a founder willing to build one with them. That’s the part most businesses skip.
Far less time-consuming
“We’ve worked with QuickHire VA twice now… The vetting they do makes it far less time-consuming than sifting through dozens of applications on a platform like Upwork.”
Easy and transparent
“I liked everyone introduced and was able to test the waters with a few projects before finding our perfect fit. Everything was easy and transparent.”
You don’t have to commit to anything. Start with a free hour.
Start free. Go as far as you need.
How much does it cost? If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering. I would be.
The first step costs nothing. After that, you choose how far to go.
Find what’s holding your business back in 21 days.
Guaranteed, or your money back.
Start with a conversation
It’s free, and there’s nothing to sign.
1 The Bottleneck Call
1 hour, free.
Why free? Because you don’t know me yet. One conversation tells you more than this page can.
Here’s how it works:
- You fill in a short questionnaire, so we skip the background.
- You talk. I listen, and dig deeper with questions. Some will seem obvious. Others may catch you off guard. Together, we find what’s in the way.
- You leave knowing your biggest bottleneck, what it’s likely costing you, and what you can start on this week.
Yes, it really is that simple.
Stefan asks excellent questions
“For any founders feeling a bit stressed/lost in thought loops - I highly recommend having a chat with Stefan… Stefan asks excellent questions!”
Find it, then fix it
Book the Build within 30 days, and every penny you paid for the Deep Dive comes off it.
2 The 21-Day Deep Dive
£2,500 to £5,000
Diagnosed for you. You find out what’s holding the business back, what it costs you in £, and what to fix first. It takes only about 4 hours of your time, spread over the 3 weeks.
- No hours of briefing. You give read-only access. I read the rest.
- Your week, mapped: you see where your time goes, and everything that waits for you.
- Kept confidential. What you share stays between us. I’m happy to sign your NDA.
- What your people think: you hear what your team and up to 5 customers say when you’re not in the room.
- A concise written memo: what’s holding you back, and what each problem costs you.
- A blueprint for fixing your biggest problem: each step, who does what, the tools, and what it will take. You can hand it to your team, or to me.
- A call to walk you through it, and 30 days to ask follow-up questions.
The 2x Guarantee
- You find money you’re losing or wasting each year, worth at least twice your fee. If not, email me within 7 days for a full refund.
3 The 90-Day Build
Typically £8,000 to £15,000
Built for you. I build the fixes from your blueprint into your business and get them running. You get on with your week.
Depending on what the Deep Dive finds, that might be:
- Agreed before we start: exactly what I’ll build, what you’ll have at the end, and how we’ll both know it’s done. No surprises either way.
- Clear owners for each step, so your team knows which decisions they can make without you.
- Built into the tools you already use, in your own accounts, so it’s yours.
- Short videos and written guides, so anyone on your team can run or repair it.
- Training, so your team keeps working the new way after I’ve gone.
- A named owner on your team, so it never lands back on you.
The Live and Working Guarantee
- Live by the date we agree, or I keep working for free until it is.
- Anything that breaks in the first 30 days, fixed free.
If you need more:
- Hiring: if there’s nobody to own the work, I find the right person, from my vetted network or through a targeted search, and help them get started. From £1,500, depending on the role, with a free replacement if they leave within 12 months.
- Ongoing support: by now I know your business and your systems, so further work costs less than starting fresh. It can be anything from small fixes and coaching to new systems, scoped to what you need. From £1,000 a month.
Invaluable for busy entrepreneurs
“Stefan’s service is invaluable for busy entrepreneurs who need reliable talent without the usual time-consuming hiring process.”
If you’re still weighing it up
“Isn’t it faster to keep doing it myself?”
This week, yes. But you’ll prep the same calls, chase the same invoices and answer the same questions next week too. And every week after that.
The systems don’t just save you time, either. They win deals, keep customers and get you paid.
“Why not hire a Head of Operations?”
You might, in time. An experienced one costs £80,000 to £100,000 a year and takes months to find.
They’ll still need systems to run, so I build those first.
“£8,000 to £15,000 on top of the Deep Dive is a lot.”
1 customer kept, or 1 overdue invoice paid, often covers it. And because the systems run every day, they keep paying you back long after the Build is done.
And you only commit after the Deep Dive, with a fixed quote, once you know what you’re getting.
“Why is the call free? What’s the catch?”
There isn’t one. You don’t know me yet, and an hour together tells you more than any page.
If there’s a fit, I’ll say so. If there isn’t, you still leave knowing your biggest bottleneck.
“What if you don’t find anything?”
Then you don’t pay. If the Deep Dive doesn’t find money you’re losing or wasting each year, worth at least twice your fee, email me within 7 days for a full refund.
“I tried an assistant and it didn’t work.”
Often, there was no system for them to work in. I build the systems your business runs from.
“You don’t know my industry.”
I’ve worked in verification technology, robotics, on-demand delivery, healthcare and my own startups. Deals that stall, customers who drift away and work given away for free look the same in all of them.
“I don’t have time.”
About 4 hours of your time, spread over the 3 weeks. I do the rest.
“Will it stick?”
It’s written down, owned by a named person, and covered by the 30-day fix.
“I don’t want to lose control.”
You set the limits. The big calls stay with you.
Who this is for, and who it isn’t
It’s for you if
- You run a SaaS company or an agency doing £500k to £5m a year.
- You win customers through sales conversations and keep them through account management or customer success.
- The business works, but too much runs through you.
- You’re ready to let go once the rules are clear.
It’s not for you if
- Your business makes less than £500k a year.
- You want help with ads, SEO or marketing campaigns.
- You want someone to run your operations day to day.
- You need custom software or data engineering.
- You run an ecommerce business.
Book your free Bottleneck Call
In 1 hour, you’ll know your biggest bottleneck, and what to do about it first.
I take on 1 Build at a time, so places are limited.
Every month you wait, those leaks keep running.
So why not book now, before next week’s fires take over?
Find what’s holding your business back in 21 days.
Guaranteed, or your money back.
Best,
Stefan Manku
Founder
PS. Your first call is free, and you leave knowing your biggest bottleneck, either way.