200+ Customers Migrated Into One System Before Peak Sales Season

The Situation

A custom manufacturing company with two owners was at a turning point. One partner handled everything on the business side: sales, scheduling, invoicing, customer follow-up, all tracked across a Google Sheets job board, QuickBooks, Google Drive, Calendly, and a Google Contacts list of around 200 customers. He wanted to step back into a full-time job elsewhere while keeping the business growing. The other partner ran the workshop, where designs were sketched on yellow legal pads and project status updates happened by phone or text, often forgotten.

They had tried to introduce a system before. The team rejected it because it was "too much stuff to track." Whatever came next had to feel lighter than the spreadsheet, not heavier. And they had a hard deadline: the PGA Show in late January. If they wanted to scale before then, the system had to be live, adopted, and usable by both partners well in advance.

Our Approach

We started with a 90-minute discovery, not a sales pitch. We mapped every tool, every handoff, every place data was being entered twice. Then we made a deliberate choice that shaped the entire project: we proposed a starter system, not a full enterprise build. We deferred QuickBooks integration, customer portals, automated customer communications, and product catalogs to future phases, even though they came up in the discovery. The reason was simple. The partners needed to actually start using something before adding complexity. A working system used daily beats a perfect system that gathers dust.

We built two separate dashboards from the start. The executive dashboard surfaced what the business-side partner cared about: sales tracking against goals, project counts by status, recent inquiries, overdue alerts. The production dashboard was built for the workshop partner, stripped down to one rolling priority view with color-coded urgency, simple checkboxes to update status, and nothing else competing for attention. Same underlying data, two completely different interfaces.

We migrated 200 customer records from a master list, set up the CRM with company-to-contact relationships (primary, secondary, billing), built three intake forms (customer, sales rep lead, testimonial), and configured nine automations to handle routine status changes and notifications. The bookkeeper got an email automation triggered by quote status changes, so she could create estimates in QuickBooks without ever needing to log into the system.

When the workshop partner needed to upload progress photos to projects, we added that field on the spot. When he later wanted to see all phases of work in his dashboard instead of just current production, we restructured the filters during the call.

Before

• Job tracking lived in Google Sheets, customer data in Google Contacts, invoices in QuickBooks, files in Google Drive

• Workshop partner sketched designs on paper, tracked status verbally, regularly missed updates the business partner had already promised to clients

• Previous system attempt abandoned because the team found it overwhelming

• No structured way to capture leads from sales reps without giving them full system access

• Business partner spent hours per week chasing status updates instead of selling

After

• One starter system in SmartSuite with 200 customer records migrated

• Two role-specific dashboards: executive (business-side metrics) and production (workshop priorities)

• Three intake forms: public customer inquiry, sales rep lead capture, post-project testimonial

• Nine automations handling status workflow, bookkeeper notifications, and routine project transitions

• Color-coded urgency and rolling priority view designed specifically for the workshop partner's habits, not against them

• Live before the PGA Show with both partners trained and using it

The Outcome

The system was delivered on schedule and signed off as complete. Both partners had access to the same data through interfaces designed for how each of them actually works. The business partner could finally see real sales pipeline against goals, the workshop partner had one clean view of what needed his attention, and the bookkeeper got automated handoffs without learning a new tool. The starter scope held. Nothing was added that wasn't needed, and the future phases (QuickBooks integration, MailChimp connection, product catalog) were left documented and ready to layer on when the business is ready for them.