Client: A 5-person independent insurance agency operating fully remotely (anonymized)

Industry / size: Insurance / 5 employees, distributed team

Over a 12-year engagement with a Chicagoland media foundation, we built a custom editorial workflow that eliminated the equivalent of a full-time role — turning manual chaos into a system that ran itself.

The situation: The agency operates entirely remotely, with agents working from home and handling 20-100 calls per week depending on claim volume. As an insurance business, they need recorded, traceable communications tied to policyholder records both for E&O (errors and omissions) protection and because they ask the same standard of compliance from their own customers. Their existing setup made that nearly impossible.

The problem: The phone system was a tangled mess. They had three phone numbers all routing into a single line, which forwarded to the receptionist, who then forwarded calls to employees' personal cell phones. There was no proper user routing, no voicemail-to-record functionality, and no reliable connection between calls and the agency's CRM. The owner had tried solving the problem himself by attempting to consolidate everything into Microsoft Teams, but Teams didn't integrate with the agency's insurance CRM and the experiment cost hundreds of dollars per month with no working result. The vendor's promised CRM integration never materialized — their developers were in another time zone and unreachable.

• Full E&O compliance — every call and voicemail is now recorded and tied to the customer record, meeting the same standard the agency requires of its own customers
• Agents take significantly fewer manual notes because the system captures call records automatically
• 20-100 weekly calls (depending on claim load) flow into the CRM without manual intervention
• The owner has peace of mind that the business is actually compliant, not just technically subscribed to a tool that promised compliance
• The relationship has expanded — the agency now trusts us to quote their laptop refresh and is moving to managed services so they can stop worrying about the technology entirely

Client: A media company and family foundation operating an industry magazine focused on non-profit content

Industry / size: Publishing / nonprofit media

Over a 12-year engagement with a Chicagoland media foundation, we built a custom editorial workflow that eliminated the equivalent of a full-time role — turning manual chaos into a system that ran itself.

The situation: The owner had a vision that broke the traditional advertising model: instead of selling ads, non-profits would submit their own stories and the magazine would publish, amplify, and drive traffic back to them. The CRM they used was built for standard print/digital magazine operations, not for managing hundreds of non-profit submissions, custom editorial workflows, grant tracking, and traffic attribution. The software couldn't do what the business needed out of the box.

The problem: Non-profits submitted stories through a basic web form that captured everything as one block of text with attachments. An editorial trafficker spent roughly 20 hours per week manually reading submissions, classifying them, routing them to the right editor, saving attachments to the right folders, and updating the CRM. Stories got lost. Deadlines slipped. Sales couldn't see where any given article stood in production. The form tool and the CRM didn't talk to each other, so a human had to be the bridge between every system.

• Eliminated approximately $30,000/year in manual editorial trafficking work (a full 20 hour/week role)
• Successfully processed 150+ non-profit submissions for the 2025 philanthropy awards alone, plus 5-10 additional editorial submissions every month for the regular calendar
• Site sustained 58,000-70,000 users and roughly 64,000 monthly page views — driven in part by the trackable URL system that incentivized non-profits to share their published stories
• The team lost staff over the years and still did more work with fewer people because the systems absorbed the manual workload
• Sales had full visibility into article status without asking the editor
• Grant payouts became automatic and audit-friendly
• The system kept evolving for 12 years as the business changed

Client: A 6-person prepared-meal pickup and delivery business — customers order entrées online for weekly pickup or delivery

Industry / size: Food service / 6 employees

The situation: The owner knew she needed a real e-commerce website to run her business. She'd already paid a previous developer too much money for a custom-built site on PHP and MySQL — using a template originally designed for a meal-kit subscription company like HelloFresh. The previous developer underperformed. By the time she came to us, the website existed, but it was actively making her business harder to run.

The problem: The site took orders but the logic was broken in ways that required manual intervention every week:

• Customers were ordering items from old menus because outdated products stayed live on the site
• Inventory and product management were clunky and inconsistent
• Orders were being captured, but the team couldn't easily process them — every week's orders had to be exported to Excel and manually consolidated before kitchen production could begin
• Security on the platform was a real concern given the template's age and origin

The team was spending 5-10 hours every week doing manual order consolidation that should have been automatic.

The results:

• 60% reduction in manual order consolidation work. What used to be 5-10 hours of weekly Excel wrangling is now mostly automatic
• Customers stopped ordering from outdated menus because the system actually controls product availability
• Better security posture without any disruption to operations
• The relationship expanded into the next project: building grab-and-go weekly ordering and assembly-line production forms — work that wouldn't have been possible until the core website was fixed