From Five Orders a Day to Twenty-Five
How a groundbreaking website created so many orders that we had to rebuild the entire back office to keep up.
Company revenue growth
Orders processed per person per day, up from a record of 5
Online pricing and ordering in the timber trade
The website that changed everything
I was recruited to work full-time in a timber company. My first job was to build them a website. But not the kind of website their competitors had, where you'd browse products and then ring up for a quote. I built a site where customers could see prices online and place orders without ever speaking to a salesperson.
In the timber trade, that was groundbreaking. Every other company in the industry required phone calls, back-and-forth emails, and manual quotes. We were the first to let customers just get on with it online.
It worked. Orders started coming in from people who would never have picked up the phone. The website attracted customers from all over the country, not just the local area. Sales accelerated fast.
The problem it created
The website was doing its job too well. Orders were pouring in, but behind the scenes the company was still running on completely manual processes.
The website orders were piling up, but the back office process was the same whether an order came from the website or from a salesman phoning it in. Here's what it looked like: someone would print the order out. Then they'd manually type the order into Sage as a sales order. Then type it again as a purchase order to buy the wood. Then type it again as another purchase order to get the wood sawn to particular sizes.
The same information, typed into the same system, three separate times. Every time it was typed, there was a chance of an error. Wrong dimensions, wrong quantities, wrong pricing. And the record for the number of orders one person could put through in a single day was five.
The website had created the demand. Now the business needed the systems to handle it.
Rebuilding the back office
Before I wrote a single line of code, I spent two weeks documenting every single thing that happened in the company. Every process, every handoff, every workaround that people had invented because the systems didn't do what they needed. It looked like one of those murder detective boards with the red string going everywhere, linking everything together.
Then I built a complete custom system that connected the website directly to the back office. Quotes created online could be sent straight into the company, imported directly into Sage, with pricing calculated automatically. That meant no more printing emails, no more typing the same order three times, and no more guesswork on pricing.
The computers did the work that people had been doing by hand, and typing errors in order entry dropped to zero.
The result
One person could now comfortably put through 25 orders in a day. The old record was five. Not because people were working harder, but because the computers were doing all the repetitive work and the people could focus on the things that actually needed a human brain.
That extra capacity changed everything. Because the business could now process orders at scale, we were able to really ramp up the Google Ads spend to bring more orders in. The system could handle the volume, so the investment in advertising actually paid off. That's what ultimately helped to 5x the revenue of the company.
Dave technically revolutionised our company. The systems he built pulled us years ahead of everyone else in the industry. While our competitors were still taking orders over the phone, our customers were buying online with instant pricing. Nobody else was doing that.David Haddrell, iWood
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