SMALL PROFESSIONAL SERVICES COMPANY
Internal Records & Information Architecture Overhaul
7 person team, ongoing engagement
Background
This company had been operating for over two decades. During that time, information accumulated the way it often does in small businesses — gradually, informally, and without a system behind it. Files were added to a shared drive as needed, folders were organized around individual people rather than business functions, and naming conventions were inconsistent or nonexistent.
On the surface, the company functioned. But the operational foundation was fragile in ways that weren't fully visible until something stressed it.
The Problem
When I started working through the drive, the core issue wasn't just messiness — it was that the information had become untrustworthy. Files existed in multiple versions with no clear indication of which was current. Records were stored in ways that reflected who created them rather than how they'd ever need to be used. Key information about clients and relationships lived across dozens of folders with no consistent logic connecting them.
The deeper problem was that none of this had ever really mattered — because one person knew where everything was. She had her own ways of tracking things: memory, notes, spreadsheets that made sense to her. It worked. For years, it worked well enough that there was no obvious reason to change it. When you needed something, you asked her. When a report needed to go out, she handled it.
The problem wasn't that her approach failed. The problem was that it couldn't survive her leaving. There's a difference between a system that works and a system that's resilient. This one was the former.
When the first major deliverable came in after her departure, the gaps became immediately visible. What should have been a straightforward task required reconstructing information from across a fragmented system — time-consuming, stressful, and dependent on memory rather than reliable records.
That moment made the cost of informal systems concrete and visible in a way it hadn't been before.
The Work
The reorganization started with understanding how information actually needed to be used — not how it had historically been stored.
For client and relationship records, this meant restructuring folders around the entities that mattered rather than around time periods or individual team members. Instead of a folder for a specific month's reports, each client had their own folder containing everything relevant to them — reports, correspondence, key documents — in one place.
Because the company works with clients whose names and structures change over time through acquisitions and reorganizations, a significant part of the work involved creating records that didn't previously exist: a name history file tracking how client entities had changed over time, and an allocation history file ensuring that records across systems stayed consistent and accurate with each other.
This groundwork also laid the foundation for rebuilding the company's CRM architecture, which had been unreliable in part because the underlying information it depended on had no consistent logic. With cleaner records and clearer naming conventions in place, the CRM could be restructured around information that was actually trustworthy.
The engagement is ongoing. Rebuilding 20 years of accumulated disorder takes time, and the goal isn't just a cleaner drive — it's a more resilient operational foundation that doesn't depend on any one person to function.
WHAT THIS WORK ADDRESSES
This kind of project is particularly relevant for small businesses that have grown around one or two people who carry most of the operational knowledge informally. The risk isn't always visible until something changes — someone leaves, the business grows, or a high-stakes request comes in that the informal system can't handle cleanly.
The work isn't glamorous. But when information is organized around how it actually gets used, reports take less time, mistakes are easier to catch, new people can get up to speed faster, and the business stops depending on any one person's memory to function.
Engagement type
Internal records architecture, drive reorganization, process documentation, CRM foundation work
Tools involved
Google Drive, Salesforce
Status
Ongoing
