Able Axcess runs a four-day week. Here's the work that made room for it.
At a glance:
EBIT has held steady throughout the engagement, in a market moving the other way
Two new branches in Auckland and Christchurch, plus a head office relocation built for the next stage
A four-day week across the business, supported by AI in quoting and day to day operations
The Challenge: A strong business running out of room
Able Axcess has spent 26 years helping New Zealanders move around their own homes and workplaces, through modular aluminium and rubber ramps, platform risers and specialist access products for residential and commercial sites. Reputation was never the problem. The business was well known, well regarded and consistently profitable.
What changed was the ground underneath it. Growth from the largest customers slowed, which put pressure on revenue that already sat in a small number of channels. The Fielding site had hit capacity, so there was no room to build volume even where the demand existed. At the same time, the structure that had carried the business that far was adding cost faster than it was adding capacity.
We call this a growth cliff. The business hasn't done anything wrong; it has reached the edge of what its current shape can carry, and pushing harder from there leads to more cost rather than more growth. The answer is to change the shape.
The approach: fix the shape before chasing the volume
There was no single fix, and we didn't go looking for one. We worked on four things at once: cost, capacity, revenue and work itself.
Reset the cost base. We restructured how the business was organised to strip out overhead and tighten cost discipline. This is Resource Targeting in practice: work out what the business is genuinely spending its money and attention on, then decide whether that matches where the growth actually is. In most businesses it doesn't, and Able Axcess was no exception.
Build physical capacity. To enable the growth Able Axcess required in this next stage, they opened branches in Auckland and Christchurch and relocated its main base of operations to Palmerston North, a site sized for the next stage rather than the last one.
Broaden the revenue base. We worked with key stakeholders and the team to mapped the full customer journey across each channel and found the business was leaning on a narrow set of revenue streams. Working through it with the leadership team surfaced new opportunities with private customers, which has built a more balanced mix.
Take work out of the system. Manual process were eating the team’s capacity that could have been focused on growth. AI now supports the frequent, low variability tasks like quoting and several operational tasks, with documented process behind it. This is the Run and Improve split: most businesses spend everything they have on running, and never buy back the time to improve. Able Axcess bought the time back.
"We know ramps and we know our customers. What Point16 gave us was a simpler way to see the business behind that. Their questions were the hard part, they never let us settle for the easy answer, and that's changed how I lead the company more than any single decision we made.”
—Jeremy Glasier, General Manager of Able Axcess
The four-day week
The four-day week wasn't the goal at the start; it became possible because of everything above.
Once the cost base was right, the capacity was in place and the manual work had been designed out, there was enough slack in the system to give the team a day back without dropping output. It was introduced in 2025 on full pay and has run successfully since.
For a business in a physical, install-driven industry, that's an unusual result, and it's the clearest evidence that the operational work was real rather than theoretical.
Where the business is now
Able Axcess held revenue steady through a period where much of the market it operates alongside went backwards, and did it while carrying the disruption of a restructure, a relocation and two new sites. Margins remain among the strongest in the sector.
The current focus is growing market share, lifting Auckland revenue, and developing new partnership opportunities.
The work here was structural. Able Axcess came out of it with a different shape, more capacity, and a team working four days a week on full pay.
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