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Placeholder ticker — e.g. Hui speaking at GS1 Connect 2026, Las Vegas · 14 May
Placeholder ticker — e.g. Hui speaking at GS1 Connect 2026, Las Vegas · 14 May
About
Some founders come to us because the business is losing money. Others come because it is doing fine and they want it to run without them. We help with both.
5.0
Trusted by 40+ SME businesses
Thirty-eight years of experience
Years of Hui's experience
Countries lived and worked in
Different industries
Usually they turn out to be the same one.
What You Feel Every Day
Something is not working as well as it used to
Revenue is down and you can no longer call it seasonal. Customers keep complaining. A friend comes in as a customer and you wince at how the business treats a lead. Margins are thinner, and nobody can point at where it is going wrong.
What You Can't Ignore
Everyone says the answer is AI
You have heard this before. The paperless office was promised in the eighties and you got more paper and more people to handle it. Now you are told to spend on more technology and more consulting, and that this time it adds profit rather than cost. You are right to be skeptical.
In almost every case the root is the same. The process lives in someone’s head, and nobody has mapped how the work actually flows. That is why past technology added work instead of removing it, and why AI will too if it goes in first. Hui spent decades installing those systems, so we will tell you straight: fix the process first, apply AI only where it pays, and put a number on every recommendation. That is the whole promise.
Why Big Ideas Foundry
Four pillars that hold on every engagement, whether it runs for two weeks or two years.
As fast as you can move
We work at your pace, not a consultancy's. A diagnosis takes two weeks against an industry norm of three months, and every report leads with the executive summary, because that is the part you need to make a decision.
Pragmatic, and measured
Every recommendation comes with how long it takes to pay back and how you will know it worked. Every statement of work has a quantitative success criterion. It either meets it or it does not.
Candor, even when it costs us
We tell you how it is, whether that is good for us or not. Sometimes the answer is smaller than the question, and what you need is small enough to handle yourself.
No products to sell, no commissions
We have nothing against software vendors and resellers, but their job is to sell as much as they can. We sell no software or hardware and take no commissions. You pay for our time, so our duty of candor is to you alone.
Founders want to stop doing the repetitive part and get back to the part only they can do — to step back without the business degrading, and to leave something behind. None of that is possible while the operation lives in their head.
How We Work
Most of the market starts with the tools and the automation. It is the part that demos well, and usually what a founder is asking for by the time he calls someone. It also fails more often than not, because automation applied to a process nobody has written down just makes the mess run faster.
We do it the other way around. Find out first, and often the tools turn out to be a smaller part of the answer than anyone expected.
Map the people, the process and the data across the operation. Find where the cost, the margin leak and the delay actually are, then put numbers behind them so the findings can be tested rather than argued over.
Turn the diagnosis into something testable rather than an opinion. A hypothesis about a business is worth nothing until the numbers behind it have been built.
Workflows rebuilt and written down. Data that is fragmented, siloed and missing vital context gets cleaned up, connected and given an owner. This is the foundation everything after it rests on.
Lean and targeted, sized for the business you have. Automation goes in last, on top of a process that works, or it goes in wrong.
Stay in the operation after the work is done. Own the processes and the systems, keep improving them, and measure what each change is actually returning.
About our founder
That sentence has held for four decades. What has changed is the number of places it has been tested.
Hui has spent his career inside operating companies rather than advising them from outside. He has carried a profit and loss, run warehouses, sat opposite regulators, integrated the systems, and then managed the people who had to use them. Founders recruited him as chief operating officer or chief executive because they knew the business could do more, but felt it was being held back and could not say by what. That drag has a name: operational friction. Hui’s job has always been to lift it and let the business do what its founder knows it can do.
He is a generalist by design, and that is the point. He can talk to the engineer, the accountant, the warehouse floor and the regulator in their own terms, and he knows where AI fits and where it does not. Almost every failed implementation dies in the gaps between those people, because the person writing the specification has never done the job it is meant to support. Closing those gaps, the change management, is as much his work as the systems themselves.
Our industry focus
We work with businesses that make, move or sell physical product. These five are where our results and experience run deepest.
Six shops grown to forty-five, and the systems rebuilt to carry them.
A financially distressed wholesaler taken from last place in its market to first ($25m).
Three warehouses, sixty to seventy percent market share, defaults under half a percent.
A plant rebuilt from one line four days a week to three running five, and an ISO 13485 system built from nothing.
Markets opened across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe, with serialization tracing product through them.
The team
A small team that knows each other's work, and a founder who is in every engagement personally.
Associate
Marvs keeps engagements moving: mapping processes, structuring client data, and turning what we find into something a founder can act on.
Managing Partner and Founder
Thirty-eight years of running operations, now spent inside other people's. Hui leads every engagement personally, from the first conversation through to project execution.
Support Team
Jan handles on-ground operations and CRM systems, and runs the field research that keeps the analysis grounded in what's actually happening.
Like the way this practice works?
Thinner margins, work coming back to you, growth that costs more than it returns. We'll tell you what usually sits underneath it.
5.0
5.0
Trusted by 40+ SME businesses