What nine brands got out of it.
Cotton Holdings ran nine brands that each kept their own data and did their own manual work. I built fourteen internal applications and an integration layer that tied Salesforce to the brands' web properties, so the same customer record stopped being typed in three places. Website conversion rose 45%. The finance team got back roughly 18 hours a week that had gone into hand-built reports. One operation, nine brands, far less busywork.
Nine brands, nine copies of the same work.
A multi-brand company multiplies its back office by the number of brands. Every property had its own version of lead capture, reporting, and the daily reconciliation between what marketing saw and what sales saw. When those two don't match, people spend their mornings arguing about whose spreadsheet is right instead of selling.
The finance side was the sharpest. A recurring report that leadership depended on took three analysts pulling from separate systems and stitching the numbers together by hand. It was accurate, slow, and stale the moment it landed.
Connect the sources. Retire the re-keying.
The integration layer was the spine: a Salesforce-to-web sync that gave all nine brands one shared truth for leads and customer data. On top of it I built fourteen applications aimed at the specific places people were doing a machine's job by hand — field operations feeding revenue teams, marketing feeding finance.
For the reporting, I traced every figure in that painful monthly report back to its source and wired those sources straight into an automated build. The report started assembling itself. The three analysts' worth of manual assembly — about 18 hours a week — went away, and the numbers showed up fresh instead of a week old. This is the same move I run as a fixed engagement now, through the workflow automation service.
The numbers the business already tracked.
Conversion across the web properties climbed 45%, and organic traffic more than doubled over the engagement. Those moved because the teams stopped fighting their tools and could act on a lead while it was warm. The 18 hours a week the finance team recovered went back into work that needed a human.
None of this required a rip-and-replace. It was integration and a set of small, sharp applications aimed at measured leaks — which is exactly what the operations audit is built to find before a line of code gets written.
A few things worth clarifying.
- How do you automate reporting that eats a team's week?
- You find the report someone rebuilds by hand every cycle, trace where each number comes from, and connect those sources directly. At Cotton Holdings the finance reporting that had taken three analysts became a pipeline that assembled itself — about 18 hours a week the team stopped spending on copy-paste.
- What does a Salesforce-to-website integration actually do?
- It keeps one set of facts in sync between your CRM and your public properties, so a lead, a price, or a status doesn't get keyed in twice and drift. Across nine brands that meant marketing and sales were finally reading from the same book.
- Was this AI, or just automation?
- This one predates the current AI wave — it's fourteen internal apps and integration plumbing. The discipline is identical to what I build now: find the manual leak, measure it, and let a system own it. AI just widens what's automatable.
Related reading: how to find the bottlenecks in your business, or the other case studies.