Two engagements in detail — one small operator, one global manufacturer. Different scale, same five problems underneath.
The situation. Jeff runs a home-inspection company. Business was decent, but something felt off — leads seemed to fall through the cracks, the website vendor's reports never quite added up, and nobody could say where the agent referrals had gone.
What counting revealed. GA4 was tracking two form submissions. The vendor reported 26. The actual count, from a WordPress plugin nobody was watching, was about 120 a year — and it had been growing every year since 2022. Meanwhile, $883 a month was going to the website vendor with zero key events configured in GA4. The one call-tracking number covered Google Ads; calls from anywhere else went unmeasured.
The agent channel. "We work with agents" became a hard number: 786 agents in the database, 68% of whom used the company once and were never contacted again. The automations the system already offered — drip emails, bulk SMS, agent acquisition — sat dormant.
The scheduler. An end-to-end audit turned "something feels off" into seven documented UX issues, including a misqualification bug where the industry term "units" mapped customers to the wrong property type — quoting $1,495 for a $495 job.
What landed. The web-form black hole was documented in week one; the key events that close it are now live and validated. Analytics access sits with the owner now, not the vendor. And the fix list is sequenced, evidenced, and executable by his own team.
The situation. A global manufacturer of commercial-vehicle components, with order flow that punishes any bad assumption in a process. This is where I learned the discipline — not in a seminar, but inside a live system where a sync error means real trucks don't get real parts.
The sync. I automated the SAP-to-CRM flow and reconciled all 12,526 orders to the record — source file and CRM matching exactly. The manual version ate hours every week and silently dropped data; the weekly sync now lands in minutes — one recent week: 55 new orders, 81 updates, zero errors logged. The CRM went from a place where numbers were typed to a place where numbers were true.
The pricing engine. Built to catch the errors the manual process missed — mismatched quotes, stale price lists, the small leaks that compound quietly at volume.
The portal. A B2B customer portal, in development now, built to remove the customer-service quote-and-data-entry bottleneck. Customers self-serve; reps stop being typists.
Why it matters to you. The same playbook scales down. A four-person sales team running Zoho has the same disease as a manufacturer running SAP — systems that don't talk, numbers the team works around — just with fewer zeros attached.
The first call costs nothing and usually surfaces at least one thing you didn't know. Worst case, you get a free second opinion.