Case study — Grinding Dynamics

A whole business, in seventeen days.

A concrete grinder in Tauranga. Twenty five years on the tools, and every detail of every job in his head. He did not ask for a website. He asked for his evenings back.

  • 17

    Days start to finish

  • 26

    Pages published

  • 75

    Ad creatives

  • 2

    Applications

The problem

When he was on the tools, the selling stopped.

Three to four weeks later, so did the work.

  • Before

    Three hours per quote, by hand

    After

    Priced on site, before he leaves

  • Before

    Job knowledge in his head

    After

    Photos, voice and answers in a database

  • Before

    No CRM, no follow up

    After

    Nine pipelines, twenty seven automated emails

  • Before

    Invisible in search

    After

    Twenty six indexed pages

The insight

It was in a document he apologised for.

He sent through a guide he had written for builders, saying it was telling most of them how to suck eggs. Every line of it made the same argument.

Aggregate distribution cannot be manufactured after the concrete is placed.

Colour goes in at the plant. Flatness is decided at the pour. By the time anyone calls a grinder, the outcome is already locked in. So the grinder consulted before the pour controls the job. The one called at the end competes on price.

Not more enquiries. Earlier ones.

Grinding Dynamics builder portal page

The builder portal — get us in before the pour

Grinding Dynamics homepage on a phone

Mobile

The website

Twenty six pages, and the questions nobody was answering.

Ten articles averaging two and a half thousand words. The nearest competitor answers the cost question in four hundred words with a forty to one hundred and fifty dollar range. We answered it in two thousand six hundred. Seventeen pages indexed within days.

Grinding Dynamics homepage

grindingdynamics.co.nz

Grinding Dynamics articles index

Ten articles, 24,500 words

The plumbing

Nine forms, one table, two destinations.

The database write happens first. Everything downstream is attempted afterwards, and independently.

If the CRM is having a bad day, the lead is still safe. That single ordering decision is the difference between losing enquiries quietly and not losing them at all.

Every integration was verified by reading the record back out of the receiving system rather than trusting a success response. Two platforms returned success while silently discarding data. Both were caught before launch.

The app

Three hours, down to a site visit.

Twelve screens, one decision each, priced as he answers.

Seven questions, four photographs, then he talks and it transcribes. A summary he reads, then two documents: a customer quote, and an internal record holding cost, margin, photos and the full transcript.

The summary flags contradictions between what he said aloud and what he entered. If the recording says carpet and the answers say tiles, that surfaces before the quote goes out rather than on day one of the job.

Quoting app start screen

Start

Quoting app customer details screen

Customer

Quoting app job type screen

One question per screen

The dashboard

So the business can be seen, not remembered.

Seven sections, including a calendar with a twenty eight day cure lock, so a job can never be booked before the concrete is ready. Stock is derived from movements and cannot be typed over. Completing a job writes the usage automatically.

Dashboard overview showing quoted, won and outstanding figures

Overview — quoted, won, owed

Job progress board with upcoming, progressing and complete columns

Job progress — three stages

Stock page listing every active consumable

Stock — a ledger, not a number

Dashboard overview on a phone

Every page works on a phone

Acquisition

Twenty five ads, twelve different shapes.

Social platforms group visually similar ads and treat them as one. Twenty five variations of a single layout would have competed as two or three. So the set runs across twelve genuinely distinct structures.

Polished concrete ad creative reading the floor is the feature

Polished concrete

Pool surrounds ad creative reading grip that cannot peel off

Pool surrounds — the point of difference

  • 75

    Creative files, twenty five concepts, three ratios each

  • 82

    Search keywords, phrase and exact only

  • 28

    Negatives. He grinds slabs, he does not pour them

  • 27

    Emails across nine automated sequences

The point

He did not ask for any of this.

He asked for a business that could run without him standing in the middle of it.

The content answers what he used to answer on the phone. The portal sells while he is on a machine. The pipeline catches leads without him touching them. The emails follow up on their own. The app gets the job out of his head. The dashboard lets him see the business rather than remember it.

The measure of this work is not traffic. It is whether he gets his evenings back.

Start something

Tell us what needs to run without you.

Figures are production values at the time of writing. Search and social campaigns were complete and paused at handover.