Futureman LabsConstruction / Manufacturing
Running the Ops Stack for a Brick-Cladding Manufacturer
A brick-cladding manufacturer ran sales out of one rep's inbox and the factory out of a whiteboard and one person's memory. Over four months the website, the lead funnel, the sales layer over the CRM and a production app were built and are now run week to week. This engagement is active.
- Named contacts captured in four months
- 247
- Daily search impressions
- +93%
- Quotes issued since Aug 2025
- 345
- Scheduling before
- Whiteboard and memory
Client
The same Australian engineered-cladding manufacturer, seen across the whole business rather than the pipeline alone. The product is sold to architects, engineers, builders and installers rather than delivered as a contracting service, and the team is small: a founder, an operations lead, one business development manager, and a handful of factory and marketing staff. This study covers the four-month build across the website, the lead funnel, the sales layer and the factory floor. Anonymized, active engagement.
Stack
The problem
Two halves of the business were running on the same fragile pattern: everything important lived in one person's head. On the sales side, the single business development manager's inbox was the source of truth for every project, so the rest of the team had to call him for an update and the CRM was filled in late, by hand. On the factory side, the cutting queue, the colour sequencing that stops one brick contaminating another, and the staggered material orders were all held by the operations lead, mostly on scrap paper. An earlier off-the-shelf app had been tried and abandoned, used for nothing but a basic cut list. The website added to it: slow to change, missing the technical information buyers wanted, and with no analytics behind it.
What we built
Four connected pieces, shipped in sequence rather than as one big launch. A new website on a custom stack, with gated technical guides, a labour and materials calculator, and a chat bot the team can update by messaging a bot in Google Chat. A sales layer over the CRM that reads the rep's email and CRM through their APIs, answers questions with links back to the source email, and runs a nightly scan that proposes CRM updates into a review tab for a human to approve before anything is entered. Automated nurture sequences by lead type, sent from a separate subdomain, so the rep gets one notification per lead instead of answering the same questions by hand. And a production app that turns accounting quotes into cutting, order and packing lists, schedules jobs on a Gantt, logs daily cut quantities, handles goods-in and timesheets, and gives floor staff a view with no pricing in it.
What changed
Before the rebuild the website captured no contact details at all. In the four months from June to early October 2026 it captured 247 named contacts across 280 interactions: 188 technical manual downloads, 58 enquiries and 34 calculator runs. Of those contacts, 59 were architects or specifiers and 41 were builders or contractors, with no paid advertising. Daily search impressions rose 93 percent, from 97 to 187, and daily clicks from 9.1 to 12.1, comparing 11 April to 31 May with 16 August to 6 October. The technical manual flow now attracts architects and takes the repetitive phone calls off the rep. CRM updates moved to daily or twice daily, which is what made pipeline analysis trustworthy in the first place. The production app is in daily use by the operations lead, a full yard stock take means on-hand inventory is accurate, and every won job now lives in it rather than in CRM stages that were never meant for production. Timesheet approval runs on a weekly email link through to payroll.
The takeaway
This is what an embedded engagement looks like when it works: not one system delivered and handed over, but a weekly cadence where the next most expensive manual step gets removed, then the next. The pieces compound because they share the same data. The measure is not how impressive any single build is, it is whether the business still needs a particular person to be reachable before anything can happen.
“If you've got 1% of stuff that needs any type of manual brain power, it's better than the whole process.”
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