CRM & Automation
One place every enquiry lands, and something that acts the moment it does.
A CRM on its own is a filing cabinet. It earns its keep when something acts on what is in it: the reply, the chase, the review request — none of them waiting on somebody to remember.
This is where most of our work goes. The website is the front door. This is the building behind it.
01 — The stack
A website is one layer of eight.
Most businesses buy the layer they can see. The six under it still have to happen — they just happen in somebody’s head, in a second inbox, or not at all.
Choose a layer to see what it is made of, whose job it is, and where it is shown working below.
Someone with a job that needs doing and a shortlist of people who might do it.
Everything underneath exists to be worth the next twenty seconds of their attention.
Attention · Doubt · A shortlist
This layer is people. We do not supply it.
- How we build websites
The pages, the words on them, how fast they load, and the one thing each page is asking for.
A site that is only this layer can be beautiful and still leave every job below it to be done by hand.
Pages · Copy · Performance · Search
We build and operate this layer.
- The join, working
Forms, calls, chat and everything else an enquiry can come through, all wired to one destination.
No channel is a dead end, and nothing waits for somebody to remember to check a second inbox.
Forms · Calls · Chat · Attribution
We build and operate this layer.
- The record, working
One row per customer, with the whole history attached to it and nothing kept in somebody’s head.
What one person knows stops being the only place it is written down.
Fields · History · Ownership · Notes
We build and operate this layer.
- The rules, running
The conditions that decide what an enquiry is worth, who it belongs to, and how long they have.
Priority stops being whoever shouted most recently, and starts being the work you actually want.
Scoring · Routing · Deadlines
We build and operate this layer.
- A sequence, running
Sequences you set once, fired by a trigger — the reply, the chase, the reminder, the handover, the stop.
The work everybody agrees should happen happens in your worst week as reliably as in your best one.
Triggers · Sequences · Reminders · Stops
We build and operate this layer.
- The board, working
Stages, owners and dates for everything in flight, with the next action written on every card.
You can see what is in flight, what it is worth and who is holding it.
Stages · Owners · Forecast
We build and operate this layer.
The people, doing the parts of the job that need a person to be there.
Fewer things to hold in your head, and none of them the ones a machine was always going to be better at.
Judgement · Craft · Relationships
This layer is people. We do not supply it.
Six of the eight are ours to build. The other two are made of people — the customer you are trying to convince, and the team you are trying to free up. Anybody who tells you those two come in the box is selling something else.
02 — Contents
What is actually in one of these.
Every build has all of them. Leaving one out is what produces the half-system a business ends up living with.
The five that can be shown rather than described are shown, below.
- Capture
Every route in — form, phone, the message that came through a social profile at ten at night — arrives in the same place.
- The record
One customer, one history. Whoever picks the phone up next can see all of it without asking them to explain again.
- The pipeline
Stages that describe your actual job, and one glance that shows what has stopped moving.
- Automations
Written down once and then honoured every time, including the Friday nobody is watching the inbox.
- Follow-up
Sequences that keep going after the first message and stop the moment somebody replies.
- What you look at
A short list of numbers that would change a decision. Not a dashboard with forty tiles nobody opens.
03 — The record
Four ways in. One place they land.
Enquiries do not arrive down one tidy channel. Form, phone, WhatsApp, your Google listing — the system does not care which.
Every one of them becomes a record with a stage, an owner and a next action — so the question “where did that one get to?” has an answer.
- 14:02Enquiry created from the website form.Automatic
- 14:02Tagged “refit”, assigned to Sales.Automatic
- 14:03Confirmation sent with what happens next.Automatic
- 14:31Called back. Site visit offered for Thursday.
An illustration, not live data. The lines marked auto ran on rules, not on somebody remembering.
04 — Autonomous workflows
When something happens, the system already knows what happens next.
“Autonomous” is a word that has been worn smooth. Here it means something narrow and checkable: a trigger, and a consequence that does not need a person in the room.
These are the common ones, not a set we arrive with already switched on. Which of them run is your decision, and anything that speaks to a customer is in words you wrote.
- When
An enquiry arrives, from any channel, at any hour.
ThenIt is acknowledged within seconds, given an owner, and put on the board. If nobody has touched it by the time you said, it says so.
- When
A call comes in and nobody can get to it.
ThenA text goes back before they have dialled the next number on the list — who you are, that you saw the call, and when you will ring.
- When
A quote has been sitting unanswered for three days.
ThenA chase goes out, then another later in a different tone, and then it stops — the fourth chase is what loses the job, not the second.
- When
A job is marked finished.
ThenThe invoice goes out, and the review request follows once the work has had a day to settle. Neither one waits on somebody remembering.
- When
Somebody replies to any of it.
ThenEvery sequence they are in stops immediately. Nothing is more obviously automated than a chaser arriving after the conversation has started.
One of them, running — the missed call, because it is the expensive one
A missed call, recovered: the call is missed, a record is created, a text goes out, and the workflow waits for a reply — then either books a callback or notifies the owner. Every step is written out below, and the event log records them as they happen.
Five minutes is a setting, not a rule — so is what the text says, who it tells and how long it waits. This is one workflow; a business usually runs several at once.
Every line in that log follows a rule you set, in the order it is written, whether or not anyone is at a desk.
05 — The pipeline
You move the card. It does the rest.
A pipeline is not a spreadsheet of names. It is every live job in one place, wired — so moving an enquiry from one stage to the next is not admin, it is an instruction.
Move it along and watch what happens underneath.
- NewBathroom refit
- Contacted
- Quote sent
- Won
- Record created from the website form.
- Owner set, and the enquiry confirmed back to them.
06 — Follow-up
Going quiet is not the same as saying no.
Following up feels like nagging, and there is always something more urgent. So the quote sits there until it is somebody else’s job.
A sequence does it instead — on a schedule, and in your words.
You set this sequence once; after that nobody has to remember it. Choose the day they reply — everything after it is called off.
07 — The join
The website and the CRM are not two projects.
This is the part almost everybody gets wrong. The site is built by one company, the CRM set up by another, and the join between them is a forwarded email somebody has to read.
Built together, there is no join to get wrong. Fill this in and watch what the business already knows before anyone has looked at it.
On your website
A demonstration of a form on your site. Change the details if you like — nothing is submitted, stored or sent anywhere.
In the CRM, the same second
No record yet.Send the enquiry and watch this fill itself in.
08 — After the job
The job ends. The customer does not.
Almost every system stops at “won”. The invoice goes out and the customer quietly falls out of the business, until somebody has a slow month and starts ringing round old jobs.
Winning a customer is the expensive part. Keeping hold of one is close to free.
- Day 0WonDeposit requested and the job written into the calendar.
- Day 12DeliveredWork finished. The invoice goes out without being chased.
- Day 13AskedReview requested while they are still pleased with it.
- Month 11Kept warmA service reminder that arrives because it is due, not because someone remembered.
- Year 2ReturnsThey book again, or they send somebody who does.
And the cheapest enquiry you will ever get starts back at the top.
09 — Limits
What it will not do.
Anybody can list what a system does. The list that tells you something is this one.
- It will not fix a process that is broken. If quotes are slow because the pricing is unclear, automating the chase speeds up everything but the quote.
- It will not make the judgement calls. Which jobs are worth quoting, what to charge, when to walk away — that stays with you, and it should.
- It will not sell for you. It buys back the hours admin was taking; what you do with them is the actual business.
- It will not survive stages nobody agrees on. If two people would put the same job in two different columns, the board stops meaning anything within a month.
- It will not run forever untouched. Businesses change, and once or twice a year something in it should be rewritten — we would rather say that now than discover it with you in eighteen months.
- It will not hold a conversation on your behalf. Every automatic message is one you have approved, in your words — an acknowledgement, not an impersonation. Which of them exist at all is your decision, and “none of them” is an answer we have no problem with.
10 — Delivery
Built in the order that pays you back first.
The alternative is a long silence ending in one big switch-on, which is how systems arrive fully built and quietly wrong.
What it asks of you is a couple of honest hours at the start. We can build everything else; what we cannot do is guess how your business runs, and a system built on a guess is worse than no system.
What it should not ask is that you work differently. The point is to take out the remembering, not to hand your team new rules to follow.
- One honest conversation
Who picks an enquiry up today, where it goes, what gets said, and the part everybody knows is dropped. What is real, not what the process document says.
- Capture and reply first
The bleeding stops before anything else is built. From the moment this is live, every enquiry is recorded and answered — even if the rest of the system is still half-finished on our side.
- The board, then the rules
Stages next, because automations need somewhere to move things to. Then the triggers go on one at a time, so when something behaves oddly it is obvious which rule did it.
- Watched, then handed over
We run it with you while real enquiries go through it, because the first fortnight always finds something the conversation did not. Then you get shown how it works, in your language, not ours.
- And then it does not stop
Handover ends the build, not the arrangement. After it we are the ones keeping it running, the ones who answer when something needs changing, and the ones who go looking for where enquiries are stalling — and then rewrite that part.
11 — Software
We are not asking you to bet on our software.
We do not sell a CRM of our own, and we would be careful with anyone who does — it makes leaving expensive by design.
The system is built on established platforms, configured around how your business runs. If you already pay for one that fits, the work is usually wiring it up rather than replacing it — a migration nobody needed leaves the fault exactly where it was. The account is in your name, and the customer data is yours, exportable, and leaves with you.
What you are paying us for is the thinking and the build. That is the part that decides whether any of it works.
Four questions. The last one is the only one about you.