One place to run Standley

You sent over the quotes, the roadmaps, the QS estimates and access to HubSpot. Going through all of it changed my mind about several things, so this version corrects them rather than quietly building something different from what I described.

Four things I got wrong or did not know:

These came out of looking at HubSpot and none of them need software.

When we sat down, the thing that struck me was how much of the business you're holding in your head. You know which leads need chasing, where every job has got to and what each one is worth, but that knowledge is mostly in your head rather than written down anywhere. The tools you've got are each holding a piece of it and none of them talk to each other, so you end up being the thing that joins them up.

That's got you a long way and the pipeline speaks for itself. The difficulty is growing past it, because at the moment nothing moves unless you're the one moving it.

Here is what I saw when you walked me through it, and what the CRM confirmed afterwards:

None of this is a criticism of the tools. HubSpot is good at leads. Buildertrend is good at giving customers a view of their project. The problem is that nothing talks to anything else, so you are the part that carries information between them.

Small phases. Each one has to be useful on its own before we start the next.

I am not going to try to replace everything at once. That is how these projects end up taking eight months and getting abandoned. We build the one thing that saves you the most time, get it working, and then decide together what comes next.

This is the part I have corrected. Looking at your Mayford Road quotes side by side, your quote is eight items, A to H, and seven of them carry the same figures in both. Prelims £5,000. Kitchen £4,000. Flooring £4,000. Bathroom £8,000. Glazing £4,000 to £6,000. Heating £3,000 to £5,000. Decorating £5,000 to £10,000.

The only line that moves between the two options is the build itself, £60,000 to £70,000 on one and £110,000 to £120,000 on the other. The total is simply those figures added up.

So the system does not need to work out your pricing. It holds your standard allowances, you set the build figure, and it assembles the document with your scope wording, your exclusions and your terms. If an allowance changes, you change it once and every quote after that uses the new one.

One screen with every live job on it, in your stages: Qualification, Appointment Booked, Architectural Drawings, High Level Quote, Formal Quote, Verbal Approval, Closed Won, Closed Lost. Those are the names already in your HubSpot, so nothing new to learn.

The change in this revision is that builds and architectural packages are separated. At the moment a £3,499 fee proposal and a £187,000 build sit in the same column and get treated the same, which is part of why that column has 68 jobs in it. On the board you can look at one, the other, or both.

Each job shows the customer, the address, the value and how long it has been sitting there. Drag it across as it moves and HubSpot updates behind it. Anything that appears in both pipelines gets flagged so you can see how much of that is going on.

It works on a laptop and on your phone. Save it to your home screen and it behaves like an app, without needing anything from the App Store. A proper app would be a separate piece of work.

These are all things you raised, and they are all worth doing. They are not in the first build because I would rather get the quoting and the board working and in your hands quickly.

HubSpot stays. Your Meta leads land there and it works. The new system reads from it and writes stage changes back to it, but it does not replace it.

Buildertrend stays. Your customers are using it on live jobs and pulling them off it mid project would not be fair on them. Phase 3 gives you your own customer view, at which point you can decide.

The detailed QS estimates stay with TakeOff Technology. Those are hundreds of measured lines and they do that work well. What we build produces your own quote, which is the part you do yourself in the car.

WhatsApp integration comes in phase 2.

Phase 1 is four to five weeks of build time from the point I have what I need from you. The price has not changed from revision A. Taking the pricing calculation out saved about a week, and the HubSpot write-back and the word correction put about a week back in.

There is no monthly fee for new features and no retainer. When you want something added, we scope it, I price it, you decide. If you never want anything else, you pay £40 a month for hosting and that is it. Of course you can host yourself if preferred.

The £40 a month covers keeping it online, backed up and secure. If something I built breaks, I fix it.

Worth being clear about this because it is a step up from what revision A described. For the board to be the one place you keep up to date, it has to write to HubSpot, not just read from it. When you move a job, or send a quote, HubSpot changes.

You have offered to settle this against the building work rather than paying cash, and that works for me. Before Phase 1 starts a contract between us both is to be written up. I am happy to do this if preferred.

Everything I asked for has come in, so nothing is waiting on you before we can start. Here is what happens from here.

The only thing I need from you during the build is availability. Not much of it, but I will have questions, and a quick answer on WhatsApp beats a week of me guessing.