Case Study · Industrial Distribution

We built our first virtual employee for our own business.

Before Meridian had a single client, it had a test bench: MP, the industrial sourcing business our founder runs in Montreal. MP finds tools, parts, and equipment for industrial companies — which means its week runs on research, outreach, and quotes. Exactly the kind of work a virtual employee should handle. So we built one, broke it, rebuilt it, and ran it on real revenue before we ever asked a client to trust us with theirs.

Full disclosure up front: MP is our founder's company. That's the point. Every number below comes from a business we had to keep running while the agent learned.

The starting line

Before the agent, lead generation at MP was entirely manual:

  • Research industrial companies one at a time — sector, size, what they likely buy
  • Dig for the right contact — purchasing manager, maintenance lead, owner
  • Write every outreach email from scratch
  • Track follow-ups by hand

It's not hard work. It's relentless work — the kind that gets skipped the moment a live deal needs attention, which is exactly when the pipeline quietly dies.

What we built

One agent, plugged into the tools MP already used. It handles the pipeline end to end:

01

Research

Reads a target list and builds a short profile per company: what they do, what they likely source, why MP is relevant to them.

02

Contacts

Finds the right person and role. Flags low-confidence matches for a human instead of guessing.

03

Drafting

Writes outreach in MP's actual voice — trained on real sent emails, referencing what makes each target relevant.

04

The human gate

Nothing sends itself. Matt reviews every draft: one click to send, edit, or kill. The agent does the four hours of digging; the judgment call stays human.

The numbers
5×
Qualified leads per week vs. the manual baseline
12+
Hours returned to the week
3 wk
From first contact to the full pipeline running

These are our own measurements, from one small business — ours — against its pre-agent manual baseline, tracked in the build log over the agent's first weeks in production. We're not presenting them as an audited study. We publish them because this page exists to be checked, and a multiplier with no baseline behind it is just marketing.

What broke

The first version was worse than doing it by hand. Two failures were worth the scars.

The drafts sounded like a template. Our first instinct was to write the agent more rules — tone guidelines, do's and don'ts, a style guide. It got more generic with every rule. What fixed the voice was the opposite move: fewer instructions, more real sent emails in its context. The agent learned MP's voice by reading MP's actual mail, not by being told about it. Show, don't instruct.

It guessed at contacts it shouldn't have. Early on it would confidently name a "purchasing manager" it had half-inferred, and a wrong name in a cold email is worse than no email. The fix was a confidence rule: below a threshold, the agent stops and flags the contact for a human instead of guessing. Being willing to say "I'm not sure" turned out to be the feature that made the rest trustworthy.

Some things we left alone on purpose. The agent doesn't decide who's worth pursuing, and it doesn't send. Those stayed human because they're judgment, not digging — and judgment was never the bottleneck.

What this proved

The build for MP is the same build we now sell: context audit → knowledge base → agent in your existing tools → human review on everything that leaves the building. We didn't design that process in a pitch deck. We designed it by running it on our own payroll.

Your week probably has a version of this.

Research, outreach, quoting — the pipeline work nobody has time for. The first conversation is free, and we'll tell you honestly if an agent isn't the right answer for it.

Book a free call → See how we'd scope it
30 minutes, free. If your workflow doesn't need an agent, we'll say so.