Ike Commercial Real Estate
Ike Commercial Real Estate is a small firm in a relationship business, running on a CRM that made them work for every piece of context. In six weeks we assessed, designed, built and trained them onto HubSpot Marketing and Sales Hub, shaped around the way they actually work with clients. Four people now run their entire day out of one system.
The CRM was the obstacle, not the tool
Ike Commercial Real Estate helps businesses find commercial space and then sits on their side of the table for the negotiation: terms, location, price. It is a relationship business, and the way Ike builds and keeps those relationships is the thing clients are buying. Blake, their CEO, had already done the research and decided HubSpot was where they needed to be. What he did not have was a way to get there without losing anything on the way out of Go High Level.
The day to day was the real problem. In Go High Level, companies and contacts are not natively tied to each other, and even where a link exists, a note left on one record does not show up on the other. For a firm whose entire value is knowing its clients, that gap is expensive. The context for a single relationship sat in pieces, and assembling it before a call meant opening records one at a time and filling in the rest from memory. Every task took more steps than it should have. The tool was a source of friction rather than an enabler.
Email was its own problem. The sending domain was not properly verified, campaigns were landing in the Promotions tab instead of the inbox, and the numbers underneath were quietly underperforming as a result.
Assess first, then build around how Ike actually works
We opened with assessment workshops, run with both the stakeholders and the people who would be in the tool every day. Not a requirements form, a conversation about what the work looks like. From that we wrote an implementation scope and agreed it before anything was built, so the project had a defined destination rather than a direction.
Ike does a couple of things with clients that no out of the box CRM object describes, and those are the things that make them worth hiring. So we built custom objects around them rather than asking Ike to bend their process to fit a standard deal pipeline. This was the most interesting part of the build and the part that took the most thinking.
Then the migration: 2,000 company records and 1,500 contacts moved across, properly associated on the other side. Notes and open tasks were the catch. Go High Level does not include either in its standard export, which for Ike meant leaving behind hundreds of client notes and live follow ups, the exact history the whole business runs on. We wrote a custom script to pull that data out of GHL and bring it over with everything else. Alongside the build we fixed the email foundation, verified the sending domain, and trained the team. After launch their feedback drove a round of small adjustments, which is usually where adoption is won or lost.
One system, with more in it than they had before
Four people now work exclusively out of HubSpot. Everything they knew about a client is in one place, with the note history that came with them, and nobody is checking a second tool to find the rest.
They also have things they never had. Email and website activity against the contact record, lead scoring, and visible progress through nurturing. For a team whose edge is knowing their clients well, that is a real addition rather than a dashboard: it is context they could not previously see, arriving without anyone having to go and get it.
The whole engagement, from the first assessment workshop to a trained team working live, took about six weeks.
[One quotation from the person who signed it off. Two or three sentences, in their words, not ours.]