Check out real outcomes we built for real customers.
Our customers love the productivity and data-driven decision-making we facilitate.
Project Manager, Production Manager, CRM & ERP
Fourth Dimension Sign (Minneapolis, MN)
Custom Manufacturing
"I purchased a decades old sign fabrication business at the start of 2024. Before I purchased this business, revenue growth had stalled out for many years and there were no software systems in place outside of Quickbooks. To grow, we had to bring on estimating, project management, and ERP tools. I spent an entire year evaluating options only to come to the conclusion the ready made solutions sucked, didn't integrate well, and were overpriced.
Then I discovered Airtable and realized it's potential — but I had no idea how to build it out. I found Parker and he helped successfully guide and implement the development of our custom business application built with Airtable. I can now confidently say that our software solution is better than any other sign shop I have worked with. We now have the CRM/ERP in place to grow revenue 5X.
Working with Parker was a breeze. He has the technical knowledge paired with a practical understanding of business operations. He has transformed how we do business."
-Nathan Melby, Owner
Context
Dimension Sign is a small business looking to grow and compete as they expand their footprint in the shadow of Minneapolis. Based out of Vadnais Heights, MN, they bid on, produce, and install custom sign projects. Just imagine all the ADA-compliant, braille-embedded signs at your old elementary school - they create those!
Nathan Melby, a champion of systematic growth, had a vision for building a custom tool that could help his nimble team operate better.
**Note: real customer data is hidden for privacy purposes**
Objectives
Nathan laid out clear and ambitious objectives to solve for operational problems at the outset of the project:
- Clear the estimation bottleneck: Improve the number of estimates his team can produce by reducing the amount of time it takes to build out products and estimate line items, allowing for each stage in his operation to operate at full capacity.
- Reduce lag time between task hand-offs: Create passive communication opportunities and trigger notifications to be sent to subsequent project actors when a predecessor task is completed.
- Manage customers, vendors, and end users: Develop a CRM tool that can hold account and contact information, as well as any formal paperwork associated with those accounts, all in one place.
- Improve data flow and data retention: Map the "data's journey" (very similar to the "hero's journey" you read about in middle school). Develop the ability to create custom products based off of estimated costs, convert the estimate to project, purchasing, and production action items, and reconcile all finances properly (in Quickbooks Online, an external app) at the close-out of a project.
Outcomes
Nathan was very pleased with the final product: A CRM / ERP, Estimate Builder, Project Manager, and Production Manager all rolled into one Airtable tool (with a Quickbooks integration). His team can now build products, estimate projects, and produce amazing things in a fraction of the time it used to take!
Tools Built:
- CRM
- ERP / Material Library
- Estimate Builder
- Project Manager
- Production Manager
- Documentation / Training Cover Page
Tech Stack Migration
Bednark Studio (Brooklyn, NY)
Fast Fabrication / Residential Millwork
Context
Bednark Studio is a 150-person, 2-location custom fabrication shop based in Brooklyn, NY. As a mature, complex organization, they were transitioning from Asana to a custom woodworking software called Innergy. They turn designers' wildest dreams into reality, from a Spongebob-themed Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float to a gigantic version of Polly Pocket. Their ability to create incredible, one-of-a-kind pop-ups, experiential marketing, and literally anything you can imagine is unparalleled.
Objectives
Raphael Sorcio, Bednark's CEO, tasked his management team with finding an all-in-one technology platform to replace the swarm of independent software they were using to draft, estimate, manage, produce, and install projects. He charged them with find a solution that improved some key business aspects:
- Consolidate the tech stack: going from a combination of Google Suite, Asana, Excel, CAD, Quickbooks, Ramp, and many other software solutions to one centralized source of project management with a couple of integrations was paramount to improving collaboration and accountability among team members.
- Create & migrate database tables to Innergy: A primary goal of the project was to effectively migrate their current databases to the new system. This involved working with eight different project managers to ensure their purchasing and production workflows were uninterrupted, thy were trained on the new work flow, and their new workflow was more efficient than the old one.
- Improved data-driven decision making: There was a desire to improve data collection to provide more of a basis for making decisions based on numbers, not gut.
- Financial transparency: Insight into financial data on each project needed to be better understood to more accurately plan for projects and evaluate the performance of project managers.
Outcomes
Bednark Studio's old tech stack has been left behind and they have fully migrated to Innergy. We are still working with them in a maintenance capacity and enjoy hearing about their improved operations and efficiency. Their finance team is happy too - they now are able to understand exactly what moves the needle, and Raphael can make decisions that are backed by data, driving up accountability and rewarding high performers.
Dashboard, Data Upload, Data Storytelling
New Energy Nexus (d.b.a. The Clean Fight) (New York, NY)
Clean Energy Non-Profit
"What made working with Zach and Parker so easy and so great was how they actually developed a deep understanding of our business in a short period of time. I can easily see how you could carry that same level of understanding for other companies we work with, in clean energy or any other non-profit sector."
-Julia Park, Program Director
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Context
The Clean Fight is a not-for-profit dedicated to accelerating the adoption of proven, ready-to-install climate solutions in New York State and beyond. TCF designs and implements programs to prove out clear pathways for their adoption and to support innovators bringing the most impactful solutions to scale.
Julia Park & Kelly Merryman wanted to improve their data processing capabilities, enhance their dashboard visualizations for internal stakeholders, and improve their reporting and internal suite of business tools.
Objectives
Julia & Kelly had a vision for the future state of their Airtable tools and laid out some of their desires at the outset of the project:
- Create a TCF dashboard: visualize data for subsets of clean energy companies, viewing their growth through multiple lenses to see the overall TCF impact on fundraising, revenue, and headcount.
- Database structure consolidation: the database structure was fractured into multiple Airtable bases. Data unification helped bring data from multiple sources together into a single company profile.
- Improve the data upload process: TCF has an externally generated report that they reference when importing data into their base. We created an easy import workflow that links companies to their relevant data records through a fuzzy matching script and some native Airtable automations.
- Help create a data narrative: once all of the data was cleaned up and workflows were determined, we created interfaces to improve their ability to dive into company data and understand the way that companies have grown and changed since joining the TCF ecosystem.
Outcomes
Julia & Kelly were overjoyed with the final product: an organized data-driven decision-making tool that allows them to understand complex and complicated batches of information and translate that information into impactful stories so that they can continue to help power the world of environmental entrepreneurs.
Tools Built:
- CRM / Company overview tool
- Import workflow with fuzzy-matching script for foreign report uploading
- Dashboard visualizations
- Documentation / Training Cover Page