Their platform places customer orders with suppliers automatically wherever a supplier can be connected to. Plenty can't be, so those orders went to one person on the ops team, who signed into each supplier's portal, found the products, built the basket and placed the order, one at a time.

Bookings arrived through a marketplace and through their own booking system, and the two had to agree on every bookable space, every hour, at every site. The customer success team reconciled them by hand each morning and again later in the day. Everything in between drifted.

Applications arrived through their marketing platform, and every learner's details were re-entered by hand into their learner management system. No API, no integrations, and no batch upload allowed. Twenty to thirty learners a cohort, line by line, field by field.

Driving rules change from state to state and province to province, and they had a document for every issue in every region. A support rep would realise a question was region-specific, then go hunting for the right document while the customer sat watching the typing indicator.

Every programme they win has to be staffed, and a new one comes round roughly every six weeks. That meant hundreds of CVs, each judged by a subject-matter expert against the specialisms that particular programme called for. Never a keyword match, always a judgement.