Business Analysis & Process Optimisation
Michael Hodson
Business & Operations Specialist: practical, hands-on help for small businesses
With 18 years across large and small organisations, working in and with every area from marketing to customer management, through to legal and compliance, I have a strong understanding of how business works end to end. I'm also technically curious, and I've been learning how to use AI to maximise value for business. For a small or medium sized business, that combination means one person who can take on real business problems and build whatever's needed to solve them.
Why Me
18 years in large and small organisations has given me a broad depth of business and operations knowledge, and the nous to apply myself to most situations and deliver the right result. I've never wanted to be pigeonholed into one discipline; I thrive on a varied work schedule, and I've got more to offer because of it. That's what makes me a good problem-solver for any business owner: I come with solutions and the skills to deliver them.
Across 15 years inside Lloyds/MBNA's credit card business, I worked in nearly every part of it: marketing and digital acquisition, customer service, underwriting, complaints and remediation, legal and compliance, contact-centre planning, and day-to-day operations. I don't just understand one function; I understand how a business actually fits together.
I use AI as a tool to help me conduct rapid analysis, bounce ideas, and create slick documentation, and I've used it to build a consultancy, live websites, a published book and working software. I have a good grasp of asking the right questions, and I use my experience to steer its output, not the other way around.
As for me personally, I get shit done and want it done yesterday. I'm highly organised, and I deliver fast and to a high standard. I'm personable, easy to work with, and genuinely driven by seeing real, tangible results, not just ticking boxes.
By The Numbers
Business Career
AI-Assisted Work
Key Skills
- Solutions-oriented: practical solutions to solve your business issues
- Issues management: breaking issues into small, solvable, prioritised tasks and mitigating further damage
- Risk management: understanding your company's weak points and helping you solve them
- Project management: helping you deliver end-to-end change
- Business analysis: delving deep into and documenting how your company works
- Business documentation: creating or rewriting standard operating procedures
- Training guides & staff handbooks: getting everyone singing from the same hymn sheet
- Data analysis & reporting: analysing data and providing easy-to-understand reports
- Digital channel optimisation: evaluating and improving your digital channel success
- Digital channel process design: helping you deliver new customer journeys
- People & widget modelling: understanding your capacity requirements across contact channels
- Long-term planning: forecasting multi-year models for contact support specialists
- Short-term planning: understanding weekly, daily & intraday capacity requirements
Work I've Done With AI Assistance
From my own consultancy to live websites and working software, everything below was built by directing AI tools myself, not by outsourcing the thinking. All of it sits alongside, and grows out of, the business experience above.
My Business: Michael Hodson Business Analyst
Alongside my corporate career, I've used AI to help set up my own consultancy: affordable, plain-English process and operations support for small, owner-managed businesses (typically 5 to 20 staff), without the overhead of a large consultancy.
An outside-in look at how your business runs today, surfacing quick wins and bigger issues before you commit to anything larger.
A light-touch check-up on one process or team, showing what's working, what isn't, and what to fix first.
Full SOP creation or rewrite: clear, step-by-step documentation of how your business should run, so it doesn't all live in your head.
A custom-scoped project for wider people, systems or capacity issues, when a business needs more than a single fix.
I've built a complete, professionally branded toolkit of 65+ templates and sample deliverables, including a full SOP set, RACI matrix, staff handbook and business review, ready to adapt to your business from day one. Add-ons available on request: bespoke Excel dashboards, training sessions and ongoing retainers.
Websites 3 built & live
Fix Ellesmere Port · Live Map
Drive past it every day.
You stop noticing.
GripTek
Premium safety gear & rigging supplies
UK-wide trade & retail delivery
You can't follow anyone new until you unfollow someone old.
Writing & Automation
- 544 pages, 90 chapters, researched and written independently
- Directed an AI co-author through 15+ versioned drafts
- Formatted to full publishing standard: automated contents, running headers, consistent styling across 3,000+ paragraphs
- Original cover artwork designed using AI image-generation tools
- A custom-built planning tool, designed specifically around my own multi-project workload
- Combines Google Tasks-style lists with a drag-to-schedule weekly calendar and a recurring daily-habits tracker
- Fully configurable, with real Google Tasks & Calendar API integration
- Built, debugged and hardened entirely by directing an AI coding assistant
Built and shipped real automations, end to end:
- A weekly automated risk-monitor report that researches, self-fact-checks and delivers a styled document, unattended
- A Spotify release-tracker engineered around real API rate limits
Qualifications
Let's fix a process that's costing you time.
Free 20-minute consultation, by phone, WhatsApp or email. Based in Ellesmere Port, working across Cheshire and remotely.