Wiseman Appliance — Taking a Mom-and-Pop From Post-Its to a Real System

Wiseman Appliance was a completely different challenge, but honestly just as rewarding. When I came in, the business was running off Post-its, phone calls, and somebody’s memory of what happened last Tuesday. And look, these were hardworking people with a ton of customer loyalty, but the way they operated made growth almost impossible. They had no visibility into inventory, no scheduling system, no clean way to track service calls, and no process for making sure nothing slipped through the cracks. It was basically organized chaos.

So instead of trying to force a big expensive system on them, I started by watching how they worked and figuring out the simplest ways tech could make their lives easier without overwhelming them. I mapped out the current workflow. How calls came in, how orders were taken, how service was scheduled, how customers were followed up with.... And then I started plugging in small but high impact tools. Things like inventory tracking, basic CRM functions, digital scheduling, and real time updates.

What really mattered was making the change feel natural. I trained them, I sat with their team during busy hours, I showed them how each tool was saving them minutes, sometimes hours, every single day. And the results were immediate. Scheduling stopped being a guessing game. Service calls stopped slipping through the cracks. The communication loop shortened. The team actually started trusting the system because they saw it working for them, not against them.

It was the first time that business had real operational visibility. The owners could finally get ahead of issues instead of reacting to them. And for me, it reinforced something I’ve seen over and over in my career: when you give good people the right tools and processes, their performance naturally scales. Wiseman went from being a business that felt stuck in the ‘stone age’ to one that actually had the infrastructure to compete, grow, and serve customers in a modern way. Being the person who bridged that gap for them is still something I’m proud of