The numbers, before the story.

At Sip, we were spending too much time on admin and operations, and the business needed to change. As co-founder and CEO, I started building the services that became Conducta within Sip. Here’s what happened.

I worked through how we handled orders, stock, invoices and follow-ups, then built tools within Sip to take on more of that work. Those tools became Conducta. These figures come from Sip’s management accounts, comparing the nine months after switch-on with the nine months before.

What changed first.

I started by looking at the process itself. Who picked up an order? Where did the information go? What happened if a price was missing or something went wrong? We needed clear answers before asking software to take on the work.

Much of the work was fairly ordinary. Orders could be reviewed without retyping them from emails. Stock information could be kept up to date without rebuilding a spreadsheet each week. Invoice reminders could go out without someone having to remember to send them. Taken together, those changes made a difference to how we ran Sip.

What held into the next quarter.

We then looked at whether the changes were holding. Through Q1 2026, Sip reported:

• Gross margin sustained above 35%, nine months after switch-on.
• Operating run-rate at break-even, with post-tax profit the forecast for 2026 at that point.
• Order-processing automation running above 95% straight-through on priced lines.

For me, the useful question is where similar work could make a difference in another business. If your team is spending hours processing information or chasing routine tasks, that is a good place to start a conversation.