Home / The FiveForward Framework

The method

The FiveForward Framework

Five stages, one direction: from the first agent opportunity to agents that run in the firm, with a person approving every step that matters.

Book a free 30-minute call How we work

4 min read Updated 26 September 2026

Jump to section

Why most agent projects stall

Most agent projects don't fail because the technology is weak. They stall because the build starts before anyone has named the job, the trigger and the point where a person approves.

An agent that runs needs one job, something that starts it, a defined place where one of your team approves, an owner and examples to test it on. Finding those jobs, building the agents and keeping them working takes deliberate work in order: Discover, Design, Enable, Automate and Embed.

The five stages, at a glance

Five stages, one direction, which is where the name comes from. Most firms start with Discover. If you already know what you want, such as one of the six accountancy agents, we scope it on the free call and the specification is included in the fixed build price.

Discover

Find the work worth handing to an agent. Up to six hours of sessions with the people who do the work, then a costed plan. £1,500 fixed, covering Design, credited back.

Design

The plan, the route and the fixed price, played back in about an hour. Included in Discover and never charged separately.

Enable

Workshops for the few people in your firm who know the work and will build. From £850. It is also where your team builds with us alongside, at £3,950.

Automate

The build. One of six ready-made accountancy agents at a fixed price, or a build from your plan from £5,000, typically £5,000 to £15,000.

Embed

We keep your agents running, from £750 a month. Three-month minimum, reviewed quarterly.

Discover

What happens

We talk to the people doing the work, map where the hours go and find the jobs an agent could genuinely take on, and the ones it couldn't.

What you get

With Design, a map of where the hours go, the jobs ranked by value and effort and a costed plan with the route we'd recommend.

Design

What happens

Everything Discover found becomes the plan on a page: which agents, in what order, who approves what and the route for each. At the playback you choose the route and the price is fixed.

What you get

The plan on a page, with 30, 60 and 90 day targets and the fixed price of the route you chose. It's yours whether or not you carry on.

Enable

What happens

Hands-on workshops in Copilot Studio and Power Automate on your own work: agents that start on a trigger, act and ask a person to approve, and agents that answer from your documents.

What you get

A working first agent from every workshop, and people in the firm who can build the next one. If you chose to build it yourselves, two delivery days, two build reviews and 90 days of email support.

Automate

What happens

We build the agents in your Microsoft 365, test them on your real examples and hand them over, with approval steps and logging built in. Six of them are ready-made for accountancy firms.

What you get

Working agents with documentation and a walkthrough for your team, at the price fixed at Design.

Ready-made for accountancy firms

Embed

What happens

We check each agent ran and what it flagged, chase approvals that have waited too long, fix broken connections and expired sign-ins, and keep up with Microsoft's changes and yours.

What you get

Agents that keep working after launch, answers within 2 working days on Starter or 1 on Growth, and a quarterly review of what to build next. New builds are scoped separately.

How the stages connect

Discover before Design. If you don't know where the time goes, the plan is built on guesses.

Design before building. The route, the approval points and the price are fixed before anything is built.

The route weights the middle. If we build it, Automate is the main event and Enable can be a short walkthrough. If your team builds it with us alongside, Enable is where most of the work happens.

Embed once something is live. Embed looks after what's running, so it starts when the first agent goes live.

Knowing what you want skips a step. If you already want one of the six accountancy agents, we scope it on the free call and go straight to the build.

Who the framework is for

UK accountancy and professional services firms of 10 to 200 people, where the work is document-heavy, Microsoft 365 is already in daily use and client confidentiality shapes everything. Firms that size rarely have an IT department of their own, which is why the builders the method relies on are the people who know the work.

Accountancy firms Six ready-made agents, from WIP and billing to client onboarding. Law firms Matter intake and conflict checks, attendance notes and incoming post. Financial advisers Review meeting briefs, file notes and provider responses. Insurance brokers Renewal preparation, submission packs and claims chasing. Other professional services firms The same pattern for any firm where admin sits between the work and the client.

We're based in Essex and work across the UK, online or on site:

Essex Colchester Chelmsford Ipswich Cambridge London All locations

Worked examples: how the stages are designed to run

Worked example: accountancy firm, roughly 120 people

Picture a firm that keeps hearing about agents but has no idea which of its workflows deserves one. A firm like this would start with the free call, then Discover.

Discover would mean structured conversations with the people across tax, audit and advisory who carry the admin. Three jobs would come out as clear agent candidates: the morning post, read, matched to clients and filed by hand; engagement letters, drafted from scratch despite following predictable patterns; and records chasing, with the same reminder emails and the January spreadsheet of who still hasn't sent their books.

None of those tends to come up in the first conversation. Two would be invisible to management, because the time is spread across junior staff who haven't been asked about their workload.

Design turns those three jobs into the plan on a page, and the playback fixes the route. If the firm chooses for us to build it, the three agents are built through Automate and Enable is a short walkthrough. If it chooses to build them itself, with us alongside, a few of its own people build them in the workshops, with our build reviews and support behind them.

Worked example: professional services firm, roughly 200 people

Now picture a larger consultancy that arrives at the free call already knowing the job: an agent that handles the briefing and intake for new client engagements, so partners spend less time on the coordination around them.

Because the firm already knows what it wants, there's no need for a full Discover. We scope it on the free call and the specification is included in the fixed build price, including the edge cases that would break the agent if nobody accounted for them. A build like this typically takes two to six weeks from sign-off, and the agent goes live with a defined scope, a person approving before anything goes to a client and a documented process for handling exceptions.

Book a free call to talk it through with the person who would map your workflows and build your agents, or see every fixed price on the pricing page.

Next step

Start with a free 30-minute call.

A short, no-obligation call is enough to work out which stage would move things forward most, or to scope the agent you already have in mind.

Book a free 30-minute call How we work