A custom millwork shop we work with had a problem most business owners would call a good one: more leads than they could chase. Five-person operation, solid local reputation, about $1.4M a year in work. The issue wasn't the work itself. It was the office behind the work, and the six different software tools that were supposed to manage it but refused to talk to each other.
The before-state
- Leads from the website to the email inbox (manually filtered)
- Leads from Houzz to the Houzz dashboard (sometimes missed)
- Leads from phone calls to a sticky note (sometimes lost)
- Quotes: Microsoft Word, then PDF, then email
- Job tracking: a spreadsheet with one tab per project
- Invoicing: QuickBooks, manually re-entered from the quote
Total office time per week for the owner: about 14 hours of administrative work happening on Sundays and after the kids went to bed.
What we built
We landed on a Jobber plus custom dashboard combination. Jobber handles CRM, quoting, scheduling, and invoicing out of the box. The custom piece was a dashboard that pulls Jobber, the website contact form, and the Houzz inbox into one screen that can be scanned in 30 seconds instead of opened across six tabs.
I used to have six tabs open to manage one job. Now everything routes itself. I got my Sundays back.
Total office time after: about five hours a week. Nine hours returned. Some of that went toward taking the kids fishing. Some went toward winning two more jobs the owner would have been too buried to follow up on before.
The lesson, generalized
You almost certainly don't need a custom-built piece of software. You need the right off-the-shelf tool, configured correctly, with the right connections to the other tools you can't get rid of. The job we do is mostly picking the right tool and gluing it to the rest of your business properly.