Case Study
A leading European HR consulting firm specializes in executive assessment and development. Their coordination team was spending hours every week on phone calls and Excel spreadsheets, manually scheduling structured evaluation sessions across freelance consultants and cohorts of up to 70 senior executives. Vela replaced all of it with a single CC.
Company
European HR Consulting Firm (anonymized)
Industry
HR Consulting: Executive Assessment & Development
Headquarters
Southern Europe
Reach
Europe & Latin America
Clients Served
Leading pharmaceutical, insurance, and retail companies
Scheduling Volume
400+ sessions coordinated per month
"Scheduling is becoming a hassle more and more. We're talking about batches of 60 people at a time that need to coordinate. It's getting pretty frustrating."
This firm runs Feedback 360 programs for senior executives, C-levels, VPs, directors, at major companies across Europe. Each project follows a multi-step journey: kickoff, prerequisite setup, workshops, individual debrief sessions, and wrap-up. The evaluation sessions are conducted by freelance psychologists and consultants who are brought in on a per-project basis.
The coordination challenge was enormous. Every project required aligning internal team members, a rotating pool of freelance consultants, and up to 70 external executives, all with different availability, different preferences, and zero shared infrastructure.
Freelance consultants didn't share calendars. One used paper planners. Another had four different calendar apps. A third maintained availability only in their head. Calendar integration was never going to work for this population.
So the coordination team called each participant and consultant one by one, collected availability over the phone, and manually cross-referenced it in Excel spreadsheets. For a 70-person cohort with three consultants, that meant hundreds of calls and a sprawling matrix that broke every time someone rescheduled.
Calendly's round-robin feature was tried and abandoned. It couldn't handle the constant rescheduling, the slot conflicts between participants, or the fact that consultants couldn't keep their calendars clean enough for automated booking.
What should have been tight, structured engagements stretched for weeks as back-and-forth scheduling consumed coordination bandwidth. And these weren't entry-level participants. They were C-suite executives who expected a polished, white-glove experience.
"If I didn't have Vela, I would hire external people to do it for me, or invest in a team to build something."
Vela didn't ask the firm to change how they work. No new platform, no new interface. The coordination team keeps emailing exactly as they always have. They just CC Vela on the thread, and it handles everything from there.
At project kickoff, Vela reaches out to each assigned freelance consultant via email, asking for their available dates and times. No calendar integration required. Consultants just reply with their availability in plain language. Vela collects it, builds the scheduling matrix, and begins coordinating with participants.
Participants receive warm, professional emails offering 2-3 time slots drawn from confirmed consultant availability. They reply, Vela books it. If a participant is unresponsive, Vela follows up automatically. If someone needs to reschedule, Vela handles the re-coordination without pulling the team back in.
The system load-balances across consultants in round-robin fashion, with an important preference: consultants want their sessions clustered on as few days as possible. Vela fills up one day before moving to the next, respecting buffers between sessions, local lunch hours, and minimum lead times.
The tone was critical. These are C-suite executives at major companies who expect polished, culturally appropriate communication. Vela communicates natively in the local language with the appropriate level of formality, uses time-appropriate greetings, and feels like a team member, not a bot.
A coordinator CCs Vela when a new project starts. Vela reaches out to each freelance consultant asking for their available dates. No calendar integration needed, just an email reply.
Participants receive warm, professional emails offering time slots. They just reply. Vela handles conflicts, follow-ups, rescheduling, and load-balancing across consultants automatically.
Calendar invites go out with the firm's naming convention. The coordination team gets a notification for every booking. If anything changes, Vela handles the reschedule.
70
Executives coordinated per project at peak
18
Average new projects launched per month
24/7
Scheduling coverage: 40% of responses happen after hours
70
Executives coordinated per project at peak
18
Average new projects launched per month
24/7
Scheduling coverage: 40% of responses happen after hours
The coordination team (the same people who were most resistant to change) became Vela's biggest internal champions. One coordinator, initially skeptical that technology would degrade the client experience, now reacts audibly every time she sees Vela's emails come through: "He's so natural!"
Scheduling no longer stalls during business hours. With 40% of executive responses coming after hours, Vela's 24/7 availability means programs move at the speed of the participants, not the coordination team's working day.
And when the Chief of Staff presented Vela to the firm's Equity Partners committee, their reaction said it all: "You're really going to solve this?" Her answer: "They are."
"We're having the biggest response ratio when Vela writes on holidays and after hours. I had some pushback about it, and I'm like, people are answering."
"You can't trust 20 people who are outside of your organization and have other projects to have squeaky clean calendars."
"Even if someone's going to yell at me, I'd rather see how it works live than just be stuck here."
"The status quo is calling each participant one by one. Or coordinating with their EAs, which is crazy."
"You're really going to solve this?"
Vela handles the multi-stakeholder coordination so your team can focus on the work that matters.