📈 How Custom Tech is Transforming my Company

I’m a huge advocate for building custom technology.

A lot of companies get by with “off the shelf” tech, but many businesses having unique needs.

Building custom tech allows you to leverage tools specific to you.

Here is what I’ve built / implemented in my business.

1. Employee-facing phone app

My company, Greenbox Storage, offers a pickup / delivery summer storage service for college students.

There are a lot of logistics involved.

This tool allows our campus employees to view all information needed to conduct operations.

Here’s a brief overview of how it’s used:

1. Employees view the pickup schedule in the “Needs Pickup” tab.

2. After each pickup, the employee marks the customer as “Complete” which moves the customer into the “Already Picked Up” tab.

3. Once pickups are complete, the employee toggles to the “Inventory” tab to take pictures and categorize each item.

4. In the event of a canceled or missed pickup, the employee moves the customer into the “Canceled and Missed” tab.

This phone app has been a game changer.

Next season, we’ll have automated notifications tied into the app.

Examples:

• When an employee marks a pickup as complete, the customer will be notified via SMS.

• When an employee submits inventory, our Customer Support team will be notified in Slack.

2. Management Dashboard

This tool allows us to do the following:

• View customer information

• Upload logistics data to the app

• Manage inventory

• Charge customers

3. Sales CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

In hindsight, I probably wouldn’t built a custom CRM.

It’s a ton of work with a lot of complexity.

But having a sales tool tailor made to our needs is fantastic.

Through this platform, we call and keep track of leads / customers.

After not having a CRM or sales department our first four years in business, it’s been a game changer.

We’ve also built out an SMS chat functionality (see below).

This part of the CRM is still a work in progress.

4. Customer Order Portal

This tool allows customers to make accounts and share important information with us like:

• School

• Pickup information

• Storage duration

• Drop-off information

• Payment information

You might be wondering how I got started with custom tech.

And how I found software developers?

My first developer was a college student from Dartmouth College.

He was working on the logistics side of the business and approached me with an offer to build technology for the company.

I said yes, and we were off to the races.

About a year later we had a solid foundation.

Our developer graduated from college and moved on to a full-time role.

I then hired three software developers from Pakistan to continue building.

The recruiting process wasn’t easy, but through trial and error, I’ve created a system for hiring incredible offshore talent.

If you’re interested in learning how to hire overseas talent (at no cost), an entire chapter in the Startup Toolkit is dedicated to how to do so.

Last thing.

A side-effect of building custom technology:

The value of the company increases. No doubt, this technology adds value in the event of an acquisition.

On top of that, some of this tech might be valuable to other companies in other industries.

I could license our technology to add another source of income.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s Blitz!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. The Startup Toolkit: This comprehensive course provides you step-by-step directions for how to launch and grow your startup. Through trial and error, I’ve developed these methods to grow my startup to $1M+ revenue.

2. 1-on-1 Startup Consulting: Serious about launching / growing your startup? Get the personalized help you need.

3. Promote your business to 1,400+ subscribers by sponsoring my newsletter.

Cheers,

Collin Rutherford

PS. How do these donations work anyway?