Fitfinity

Companies that grow through acquisitions often end up running the same process five different ways. That's what happened at a private aviation group we work with. Every operator it acquired brought its own processes, documents and way of onboarding a pilot. The group wanted one place for everyone to start. Everyone already worked in Microsoft, so that's where we built it, with one developer. The first month went into the foundation: a group hub, a site for each department and a page for each person. Then came onboarding. Pilots have 12 items to complete before day one, including a passport, licences, training records and a background check that only security can see. Office staff have nine. That is where post-merger integration becomes practical. You have to agree on the work behind the shared front door: > Role-based requirements: what a pilot, office employee or freelance flight attendant needs to provide. > Role-based access: which department can see and approve each item. > Workflow state: what is missing, submitted, rejected or complete. > Access lifecycle: when someone joins, who gets them set up, and who removes access when they leave. The trickiest case was freelance flight attendants. Some join for just three days. The process has to get them in quickly and remind someone to switch off their access when they leave. During the demo, the client's process lead asked: what happens if a pilot uploads a picture of their dog instead of a licence? Each section locks when it's complete, so one mistake could have meant uploading 20 documents again. Now the department can reject one document with a comment, and the person only fixes that item. That's exception handling. A process needs a way to recover from mistakes without restarting everything. We shipped six onboarding steps in one week and the remaining three the following week. If you run a buy-and-build, this is the work that comes before AI. Agree on the process, the permissions and the person responsible for each handoff. Then you have something an agent can help operate.

A PE founder building a group of specialty medical practices told our team what would win their business. "If I already have my data ready and I've already prioritized it, you're not as interesting. Then you're just engineers. You're just outsourced work, which I have access to my own." We'd suggested coming back once their data was ready and their priorities were set. They stopped us. "Don't you want to have a say in that?" They're bringing revenue cycle in-house because, as they see it, insurers are already using AI to deny claims. They can hire engineers or offshore teams. What's harder to find is someone who's done this before and can tell them where to start, whether the data is good enough and what they haven't thought of. In their words, that's "the only edge" we'd have. Most pitches in this market still lead with how good the engineers are. This buyer wanted help deciding what those engineers should work on.