Operations consultant. Not a software vendor.
There's a difference between selling technology and understanding why a business bleeds time in the first place. I start with the second part. The technology comes after.
20 years of watching businesses lose time.
I'm Leo Malan. Chartered Accountant (CAANZ). I've spent 20 years in audit, operations, and deal advisory -- mining, M&A, mid-market businesses across four countries.
Most of that career was spent inside companies during transactions and operational reviews. I'd see the same patterns everywhere: teams buried in admin, critical information trapped in someone's inbox, processes held together by memory and good intentions. Every business thought their version was unique. It wasn't.
I spent years in deal advisory, where the work was acquisitions and operational due diligence. That meant pulling apart how businesses actually ran -- not the org chart version, the real one. The patterns were consistent enough that I started mapping them.
AI Workflow Advantage came from that mapping. Not from a technology insight -- from an operations one. AI is one of the tools I use, but the real work is understanding what's costing a team time and fixing the root cause. Sometimes the answer is automation. Sometimes it's stopping a process entirely.
Understand first. Fix what matters.
Understand
I start by mapping where time actually goes. Not what the org chart says -- what people actually do, who they wait on, where work gets stuck. This is the diagnostic phase, and it changes everything that comes after.
Eliminate
Before automating anything, I look at what shouldn't exist at all. Duplicate approvals, reports nobody reads, meetings that should be emails. The cheapest process is the one you stop doing.
Restructure
What remains gets simplified. Handoffs reduced, decision points clarified, information flows redesigned. This is process work, not technology work.
Automate
Only now does AI enter the picture. I automate what's left -- the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that are now clean enough to hand to a machine. AI is the tool, not the starting point.
Australian businesses, primarily. But not exclusively.
Most clients are in Australia. I also work with businesses in the US, New Zealand, and South Africa. Everything is remote -- has been from day one. Geography doesn't limit this work.
Size: 15 to 200 employees, $5M to $50M revenue. Big enough to have real operational complexity. Small enough that the owner or GM still feels every inefficiency personally.
Industries: Trades and construction, professional services, mid-market operators. The specifics vary but the patterns don't. If your team spends more time on admin than on the work that grows the business, the problem is structural -- and it's fixable.
Not a fit: Businesses under 15 people (not enough complexity to justify the investment), businesses in financial distress (fix that first), or anyone looking for a chatbot on their website. This is internal operations work.
Background.
The short version: chartered accountant with two decades of operations experience. The longer version is the work itself -- the diagnostics, the automation deployments, the businesses that got their time back.