A couple years ago, Hubert Alacoque called me. He runs Enviro-Septic NL. They're the exclusive distributor of the ADVANCED ENVIRO))SEPTIC system in Atlantic Canada. Sustainable wastewater treatment, no electricity, no moving parts, removes 99% of contaminants. Genuinely cool technology.
But Hubert's problem wasn't the technology. It was everything around it.
He had customer info in Capsule CRM. Quotes built in spreadsheets. Payments collected manually. Sometimes he was following up weeks after the job was done. Project tracking lived in his head or on paper. None of it talked to each other.
Sound familiar? Because I hear this from almost every business owner I talk to out here.
What was actually happening
Every new customer meant entering the same data in three places. Every quote meant opening a spreadsheet, pulling up pricing, formatting a PDF, emailing it out, then waiting. Following up. Waiting again. Then when the customer said yes, Hubert would create a separate invoice somewhere else. Send that. Wait some more. Check the bank. Maybe send a reminder.
Nothing was broken. It all worked. But it worked the way duct tape works. It held things together while eating hours out of every week.
As Hubert put it: "We were juggling quotes, contracts, and payments across three different systems."
What we did
I put him on a single system that connected everything. CRM, quoting, digital contract acceptance, project management, and payment processing through Moneris. The key wasn't adding more tools. It was replacing the patchwork with one system where data actually flows.
Now when a customer requests a quote through the website, the system builds it, emails it with a secure link, and the customer can accept it right there. The project kicks off automatically with the right tasks and parts lists. Payments process themselves as the work hits each milestone.
I also built reusable project templates. Different residential and commercial installation sizes, each with standard tasks and parts. Nobody starts from scratch anymore.
What happened after
Quoting went from hours to minutes. Roughly 80% faster. Cash flow improved because payments weren't sitting in someone's inbox waiting for a follow-up.
But here's the part I'm most proud of. Two years in, Enviro-Septic NL's demand now exceeds their capacity. Hubert's exploring expansion. Not because of a marketing campaign. Because the time he got back went straight into doing better work and serving more customers.
That's the thing nobody expects. You think you're buying a software system. What you're actually buying is time. And what you do with that time compounds.
Why I'm writing this
I'm not writing this to sell you software. Most people don't know what Odoo is and honestly, you don't need to care about the technology.
I'm writing this because I talk to business owners in Atlantic Canada every week who are in the same spot Hubert was. Good at the work. Buried in the admin. Running things on spreadsheets and disconnected tools because switching sounds like a project they don't have time for. And every year, hundreds of hours go to tasks that a connected system would handle on its own.
If that sounds like your situation, I'm happy to have a straight conversation about whether what I do would actually help. Sometimes the answer is "what you've got is fine." I'll tell you that too.
Jon
I run easier.digital out of St. John's, NL. I help small businesses in Atlantic Canada get their operations unstuck.
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