Your sales cycle isn't a funnel
A file goes backwards, splits in two, waits on a third party — an insurer, an inspector, a supplier. Off-the-shelf products model linear progression, and you spend your time working around it.
By situation
A custom CRM is justified on one point only: your way of selling doesn't fit the boxes.
A configured off-the-shelf CRM suits most companies, and that's what should be recommended as long as it's true. Custom becomes rational in three cases: your sales cycle has stages no product models, the data that drives decisions lives in another system, or you're already paying for features nobody opens. Outside those three, configuring costs less and ships faster.
What brought you here
The information that decides is elsewhere
Knowing whether to follow up depends on stock, a shop schedule or a customer balance. As long as the CRM can't see it, its prompts miss the mark and the team stops listening.
You pay for a lot, you use little
Twelve seats of a rich product your team touches 10% of. The calculation deserves a three-year horizon rather than a monthly price — duration is what changes the answer.
What we actually do
A foundation that already exists, configured for your trade
We don't start from a blank page: the foundation — contacts, files, tasks, follow-ups, permissions — exists and runs. What's custom are your trade's objects and the rules that govern them.
You remain the owner of the system and the data
No per-seat licence that grows with your team, no exit lock. It's a written commitment, and it's what makes the three-year calculation favourable when it is.
Scope is closed before we start
Fixed price, written scope, two rounds of revisions. Scope creep is the first charge levelled at custom work, and it's a contractual risk before it's a technical one.
When this isn't for you
This isn't for you if an off-the-shelf product covers your need after decent configuration: it'll be cheaper, available tomorrow, and maintained by two hundred people. We say so regularly, which is why this site's home page devotes a whole section to the cases where you should stay on existing software.
No sales page writes this section. That's precisely why it's here: it saves you a thirty-minute call, and saves us an engagement we'd decline anyway.
Questions we get on this
What happens if you cease operations?
It's the right question to ask a young company, and we'd rather it came early. The answer rests on three facts: the system and data are yours, full export is a feature and not a favour, and documentation is handed over so another developer can take over. We don't ask to be taken at our word — we ask that the commitments be read.
Can we start small?
It's the only way that works. A first scope shipped in weeks, actually used, then extended from what usage teaches. A system delivered in one block after six months always lands off-target, because the need moved in the meantime.
Neighbouring situations
Fifteen minutes to find out whether we can be useful.
You leave with what we saw, in writing, even if we never work together.