How Keel built a culture of deep work to match the operational rigor they sell

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About Keel

Keel builds ops software that adapts to how businesses actually work, not how a vendor thinks they should. Co-founded by Benoit Machefer and Tom Frew, the platform emerged directly from the pain they lived at Echo (now Pharmacy2U), where they scaled operations to 50,000 shipped prescriptions a day and £100M ARR using bespoke internal tooling, because nothing off-the-shelf could keep up.

Keel is the answer to a universal ops problem: the gap between enterprise ERPs (too rigid, too slow, too expensive) and no-code tools . Their platform lets ops teams build and change workflows themselves, without engineering tickets, in days, not months.

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The Office

Workspace.co.uk : Keel is based in a Workspace flexible office in London, one of the UK's leading providers of premium workspaces for growing businesses, with 60+ locations across the capital.

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The challenge

As Keel's team grew within their Workspace.co.uk open-plan floor, the friction became impossible to ignore. Customer discovery calls, which Benoit joins personally, every single one, investor meetings, and the deep engineering sessions that define how Keel ships all suffered from ambient noise.

Moving to a larger office wasn't the answer. The right focus infrastructure was.

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The Work With Island solution

Work With Island acoustic booths (1 solo focus pod and 1 duo unit) installed directly into Keel's Workspace.co.uk floor with no construction work required, live in under two weeks. No landlord approval needed. No disruption to the sprint cycle.

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Bonus · Engineer mode

Tom went one step further: smart occupancy lights, built from scratch

Not content with just having the booths, Keel's CPTO Tom Frew wired them up to a custom occupancy indicator system, Google Calendar-synced Philips Hue lights that tell the whole office, at a glance, whether a booth is free, about to be taken, or occupied.

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