Soulhouse
Starting Point, Goals & Outcomes
STARTING POINT
Soulhouse operates Modern Bodywork studios for massage, facework and assisted stretch in major German cities. What it sells is time with an expert: a guest books a slot online, the treatment happens in the studio, one to one. Revenue at any studio is therefore a function of available expert capacity, how well that capacity is utilised, and the price of the treatment. Capacity is perishable. A treatment not sold today cannot be recovered tomorrow.
The company had reached the size where improvised processes no longer hold and rigid legacy systems do not fit either. Contracts, availability, working time and payroll lived across several disconnected tools and a set of spreadsheets. None of them talked to each other, and none of them answered the one question that governs the business: where is capacity being lost right now?
THE FOUNDERS' FRAMING
“The real question was never how we fix today’s spreadsheet problem. It was how we build the foundation for a hundred sites.”
GOALS
The strategic ambition was explicit from the first workshop: become an AI-first company, so that growth in sites does not translate into proportional growth in people and cost. In a franchise-style service model, administrative work normally scales with the number of locations: more contracts, more rosters, more time accounts, more payroll cases, more replacement hiring. At some point that becomes an extra role, and then the next one.
Four constraints defined the problem:
- Capacity was only assessable in hindsight, so lost revenue was diagnosed after the fact
- Changes in contracted hours, expiring contracts and ending probation periods stayed invisible until they hurt
- Site managers had no data to steer their own utilisation, so control sat centrally by default
- No reliable source of truth existed, which made automation impossible
The target operating model separates the business into two halves. Everything the guest experiences stays analogue and human. Everything behind it becomes highly automated and agent-operated. The design principle: automate what creates no perceptible customer value, and invest human attention where it does.
Because an agent that reallocates appointments needs to know who is available, who is qualified and what capacity exists at all, the first step was the foundation: an ERP for HR and workforce management as a single source of truth across all people and all sites.
OUTCOMES
The foundation is live and the operating model has changed measurably. The most significant effect is knowing where capacity leaks and who owns it.
WHAT THE SYSTEM NOW CARRIES
- Central master data for contracts, deadlines and probation periods across all sites
- Offered against sold capacity per site, in one view with expiring contracts and ending probation periods
- Replacement hiring decided weeks ahead instead of after a gap has opened
- Payroll derived from system rules and auditable, rolled out site by site
- Working time and leave captured in the system and linked to contract and planning
WHAT STAYED FULLY HUMAN
- The treatment itself: one expert, one guest, undivided attention
- The choices a guest makes on arrival, kept analogue in the studio
- The judgement calls of site managers, now supported by data
OPERATIONAL OUTCOMES
- Around 25% more treatment hours sold per week at peak, with no additional sites and no additional floor space
- Utilisation became a site-level metric embedded in local target setting
- Administrative effort decoupled from site count, the basis for scaling without proportional hiring
- New reporting elements delivered within the same day, because the platform is customised agentically
QUALITATIVE OUTCOMES
- Sites act as entrepreneurs within the company, because they finally hold the data to act on
- Leadership steers on capacity: the shift from reporting to management
- An AI-first operating story that strengthens employer brand and attracts people who want to build this way
The growth model follows from this: each additional site adds treatment capacity without adding a proportional share of administration. Our model puts the effect of the next doubling in site count at two to three administrative full-time equivalents (TFN assumption) that do not need to be built. That effect repeats with every further site.
+25%
TREATMENT HOURS SOLD per week at peak, with the same number of sites
100%
AGENTIC DELIVERY of the chain from discovery to feedback
2-3 FTE
ROLES AVOIDED administrative headcount at the next doubling of sites (model)
<1 day
REQUIREMENT TO RELEASE from a new reporting requirement to a live release
Henning Stitz
Managing Director, Soulhouse
Approach
Four principles shaped this engagement. The third is what makes it genuinely new.
Automation built on data spread across five tools just produces wrong answers faster. The unglamorous first step was a single source of truth for people, contracts and capacity, because every later agent depends on it.
Front of house stays analogue and personal; back of house becomes automated and agent-operated. The line is drawn by perceptible customer value, which is why some manual steps stayed manual.
Discovery, requirements, build and feedback all ran agentically. What matters to the client is what the method makes possible: a new reporting requirement live on the same day, a foundation affordable at a fraction of conventional cost, and a platform that stays malleable while the business model is still taking shape.
The method does not replace understanding the business. The nuances of a process are never spoken aloud in a workshop, so speed and domain depth have to come together.
Value appears when people work differently. A release on a server is not yet a process in an organisation. Data migration, cutover, pilot sites, training and stabilisation are therefore part of the mandate, and the measure of success is that the client operates it alone.
The TalentFormation Factor_
TFN is a network company and accelerator. For every initiative we assemble a tailor-made team from a curated network of more than 950 experts and steer it as general contractor, from the architecture of the business and operating model through technology and data to organisational development. We deliver an operating model that works.
For Soulhouse that meant holding two things at once: the discipline to build an unglamorous foundation first, and the ambition to run the entire delivery chain agentically while doing it. The engagement follows our five phases: understand, design, execute and operate, enable and internalise, extend and support. It is deliberately built to end. Enablement is part of the deliverable.