Strategic ambition. No spare capacity.

Whitefox is a creative publishing agency founded in 2012 by former HarperCollins senior leaders. Over 14 years they've delivered more than 2,000 book projects, working with a global network of 2,000+ specialist freelancers across editing, design, production, distribution, and marketing. It's a business built around quality and craft.

Like many lean agencies, Whitefox operates with a full workload across the board. The wider strategic projects — the ones that could genuinely transform how the business runs — kept getting pushed back. Not because they weren't a priority. Because there simply wasn't the in-house resource to drive them forward properly.

The opportunity was clear. The bandwidth wasn't.

"We were very aware that we lacked in-house resource. It came out of a boardroom discussion — one of the board members said, 'Can you do this internally?' Truthfully, the answer was no."

— Hannah Bickerton, MD, Whitefox

Connected Paths went across the business — interviewing the team, asking where time was lost, where frustrations were sitting, where the biggest opportunities lay. The process was structured but conversational. No assumptions brought in from outside; the answers had to come from inside the business.

The output was a prioritised report: here's what matters most, here's what can move quickly, here's what needs more time. A clear basis for decisions, rather than a to-do list dropped from outside.

"Often you don't know what you don't know…"

— Hannah Bickerton, MD, Whitefox

In small agencies, everyone does more than their job title suggests. And usually, nobody has a complete picture of what everyone else is carrying. Hannah describes the team's reaction as almost therapeutic — the experience of being properly listened to, of having bottlenecks and frustrations acknowledged by someone outside the day-to-day, turned out to be genuinely valuable in itself. Not just a means to an end.

"Having someone do the thing which they never do — understand where the bottlenecks are, where their frustrations are — the team found it almost quite therapeutic. And for someone to then list that out in a report and ask us to address it centrally was really good."

— Hannah Bickerton, MD, Whitefox

The broader rollout is continuing — methodically, on Whitefox's terms. Hannah describes the output of the engagement as "a Bible of information": a detailed, prioritised map of what to do and why, being worked through iteratively as capacity allows.

The security improvements are in place. AI adoption is growing. And the team has a foundation they didn't have before — both in tools and in mindset.

"The quick fixes have happened, the security around the business is definitely improved. We have things we can do, and slowly I'm getting through it — because otherwise you're not making a return on your investment."

— Hannah Bickerton, MD, Whitefox