Latest / Scaling Up with Fexingo: How Small Businesses Become Mid-Market Companies / How This Custom Fabricator Scaled Past 20 Million with a CRM
Transcript
- Lucas: So Luna, we've done a lot of episodes on scaling past that twenty-million-dollar mark, but we haven't really looked at the sales tooling underneath it all. Today I want to talk about a custom metal fabrication shop in Ohio that grew from about eight million to twenty-two million in three years, and the single biggest lever was a CRM they almost didn't buy. Luna: Interesting, because a lot of owners we talk to say CRMs are just a waste of time. What made this one different? Lucas: Right, and before we get into it, quick honest thing. This show is ad-free, and it stays that way because a small group of listeners chips in monthly through buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's what literally funds us making this many episodes, so if these conversations have helped you think about your own business even a little, that's where you can keep it going. Luna: Yeah, and it's not a big ask. It's just a way for the people who get value out of this to keep it free for everyone else. Lucas: Exactly. So, back to this shop. The owner, a guy named Mike, had been running sales the way a lot of owners do: everything in his head, some sticky notes, a shared spreadsheet that nobody updated. He was the one quoting most jobs over five thousand dollars, and he was the bottleneck. Sound familiar? Luna: Very. So what made him finally look at a CRM? Lucas: He lost a sixty-thousand-dollar order because a follow-up email went to his spam folder and he never saw it. The customer called a competitor, and Mike only found out when the purchase order didn't come. That was the wake-up call. But here's the thing—he didn't go out and buy a fancy, expensive system. He started with a free tier of a pretty basic CRM, and the real win was in how he set it up and got his team to use it. Luna: So what was the setup that made it stick? Because I feel like the adoption is the hardest part. Lucas: Honestly, the first step was brutal simplification. He only put three fields in the system: company name, project size, and next follow-up date. That's it. No fancy scoring, no tags, no notes at first. His team could look at it and know exactly what they needed to do that day, and that was the hook. Luna: Three fields. I love that. But how did he get the sales guys to actually open the thing every morning? Lucas: He made it the only place to see the day's follow-up list. He stopped sending reminders in email or writing them on whiteboards. If you wanted to know who to call, you had to open the CRM. And he started every morning, for the first month, by pulling up the list on the big screen in the shop and asking each person, okay, who are you following up on today? It became a habit. Luna: So it was less about the software and more about the ritual around it. What happened next? Lucas: Within the first quarter, they found that they had about three hundred open quotes sitting in that spreadsheet that were over ninety days old. Most of them, they'd just assumed were dead. But when they actually started calling those, they found that a surprising number were still live, just waiting for the customer to make a decision. They recovered about three million dollars in orders over the next twelve months just from those old quotes. Luna: Three million dollars, that's huge. But how did they keep it from going stale again? Because that's the classic problem, you set it up, it works for a month, then everyone goes back to the old ways. Lucas: He built a simple rule: any quote over five thousand dollars gets a follow-up every fourteen days until it's won or lost. And they put the follow-up tasks directly in the CRM, assigned to the salesperson. If a task sat for more than two days, Mike got a notification. He didn't micromanage, but he knew when something was slipping. Luna: So he had a way to see the state of the pipeline without having to ask. That's the real power, isn't it? It takes the guesswork out of running sales. Lucas: Exactly. And it changed how they quoted, too. They started segmenting by project size: anything under twenty-five thousand, they had a standard quote template and a faster turnaround. Anything above that, Mike still got involved, but he had visibility into every active deal. So he could see, okay, this big one has been stuck for three weeks, I need to step in. Luna: So the CRM didn't just track the pipeline, it actually helped them decide where the owner's time should go. That's a smart way to use it. Lucas: Right. And I think the most interesting part is that they almost didn't buy it because they thought a CRM was too corporate. But they ended up using a free tool that any business can use, and the whole change was more about process than software. Luna: So for an owner listening, what's the one thing you'd tell them to take from this? Lucas: Start with one number. Pick a metric, like open quotes over ninety days, and commit to following up on them systematically for two months. You'll likely find money you didn't know you had. And don't buy a big system until you know what process you're trying to support. Luna: I love that. It's not about the tool, it's about the discipline. And that's something any of us can do starting tomorrow. Lucas: Yeah. And if you want to hear more stories like this, you know where to find us. We'll be back next week with another one.