We don't rent out engineers. We embed, learn the business, and earn the next role.

The journey starts here.

In 2022 we placed a small team inside Lakeshore Learning, one of the biggest names in school supplies in the US. They sell to schools and government agencies across the country. In that market, the product is rarely the differentiator. The price is.

Buyers run tenders for near-identical items, and the cheapest qualifying bid takes the deal. If a competitor lists the same pencil a few cents lower, the contract can move with it. Lakeshore Learning had to watch competitor pricing constantly.

The same product. Three names.

• Blue Pencil$2.00
• Smart Blue Pencil$2.40
• Tiny Blue Pencil$1.85

Three competitors can buy an identical item from the identical vendor and each list it their own way. That one quirk is what kept 50 people busy.

Nobody asked us to fix it.
We fixed it anyway.

Once we understood the workflow, we could not unsee the waste. So we scoped a solution ourselves, got it approved, and built it.

We built a pipeline that pulled competitor prices automatically, every night. The breakthrough was in the matching instead of matching on names, which sellers deliberately vary, we matched on the product image.

The system compared listing images, recognised identical items across competitors no matter what they were called, and lined the prices up side by side. By morning the analysts had a clean, current, like-for-like view of the whole market.

• A clean, current, like-for-like view of the entire market every morning
• Automatic recognition of identical items across all competitors
• The fifty-person grind became a single automated nightly run

• ~50Manual checkers replaced by one automated run
• NightlyAutomated competitor price pulls, every night
• ~200Items tracked automatically across all competitors
• AMFull like-for-like market view ready every morning

Lakeshore Learning is where
we found the way we want to work.

Understand the business, not just the tickets. Own the expensive problems people have stopped noticing. We learned how to scale a team into someone else's environment without losing quality or ownership.

All of it came with us into what came next.

Work like that builds a reputation.
Reputation travels.

When a technology leader we had worked with before moved to Property Finder and needed an engineering partner who could move fast without trading away quality, he remembered how we operated. He brought us in.