Louise Hilder is a Director at Cheshire Surveys Limited, a land surveying and setting out engineering firm that helps clients make sense of the world around them. They support a range of clients from individual homeowners to major construction companies, providing customers with accurate and reliable data. With this in mind, it made sense that their own data management be just as precise.
Before Capsule, Louise described herself as a typical small business Director, keeping lots of information in her head. Data was scattered across accounting software, spreadsheets, and memories, meaning she spent a lot of time answering questions about where projects were up to.
"Lots of our customer data was in our accounts information only," Louise explains. "We didn't have something that brought things together."
The dangers of running on memory and whiteboards
Working without established processes in place created real operational risk for Louise and her team. When the team needed to know the status of a job, where a client relationship stood, or which opportunities were in progress, they had to refer to her. Decisions that should have been frictionless were bottlenecked through one person, and the team's project tracking relied on manual prioritization. While functional, this created problems when trying to scale.
Louise identified two important changes that needed to be made. First, she needed to properly track sales, with visibility across the full pipeline rather than relying on individual knowledge. Second, she wanted to formalize project management so the whole team could see active work in one place, from initial job allocation through to invoicing and close.
She also had a third, less obvious goal. She wanted her business to go fully digital but without sacrificing the personal, high-quality service that had built the business in the first place.
Simplicity over complexity
When choosing a solution, Louise didn’t rush into a decision. She spent a year exploring her options and even considered bespoke builds and more complex platforms.
"I just didn't want something that was really convoluted," she says. "It seemed to represent what we were kind of doing in the business already. It would be familiar to people."
Capsule was recommended through the Manchester Met Innovation Programme, which is also where Louise was introduced to Veronica Kitton, Founder of VK Business Consulting, and Capsule partner who helped guide the implementation. The process wasn’t immediate, and after an initial assessment, Veronica recommended that they work through a few things before implementing a CRM.
“I think we were further on than she thought we would be in terms of customer relationship management," Louise recalls. "So I went away and had a little think about that. We had a couple of meetings to discuss how it might actually work for us. But in the end, I chose to go with Capsule, and to work with Veronica on a structured process for our day-to-day operations."
Creating a structured implementation
Veronica's approach with all new clients begins with a discovery conversation followed by a bespoke demo tailored to the specific business. For Cheshire Surveys, the implementation that followed was deliberately paced.
"Louise went for my guided implementation plan, which means that we broke down the implementation over 12 months," Veronica explains. "It was very important that the team was on board and that they acknowledged how long it might take to move forward."
The rollout was structured in phases: the contact database first, then the sales pipeline, then the project management section. Each stage was scoped carefully before it was built.
For Louise, the migration became an opportunity to cleanse years of accumulated data and build something clean and purposeful from the ground up.
"I didn't just want to transfer over information that wasn't useful to us as a business," she says. "One of the things we'd never done was categorize our clients, so it was a big job just to get the initial contact list in and work out how many tags we needed."
Transparency where it matters most
What was once an informal, memory-dependent way of working is now a structured, visible process that the whole team can access and contribute to. Capsule’s sales pipeline tracks every opportunity from first contact through to close.
The Project Management tools cover the full job lifecycle, from allocation to a surveyor, through to invoicing and completion. Nothing is lost or requires chasing Louise for an answer.
"Rather than somebody having to ask me, they can ask Capsule," she says. The team now uses Capsule across both functions comprehensively, with the full pipeline logged at every stage.
The value of working with a partner
Louise strongly recommends business to work with a partner like Veronica to help them get started with Capsule.
“You can sign up for a package, but unless you've got somebody who knows the ins and outs of it and can also link that to how your business works, I don't think you get the full benefit."
Implementations work best when there's an expert who understands both the tool and the business using it. "It means that you get used to it quicker and it becomes part of your day-to-day business much more easily."
Key takeaways
Centralized client data: By consolidating scattered information into one place, the whole team gained access to the customer and project records they previously had to ask Louise for directly.
Structured sales and project pipelines: Capsule formalized two core processes, sales tracking and project management, that had previously relied on whiteboards and informal knowledge.
A clean, considered migration: Using the implementation as an opportunity to cleanse and categorize data meant Cheshire Surveys started with a genuinely useful database, not just a digital replica of the old mess.
Guided implementation that fit the business: A phased, 12-month rollout with partner support meant the team adopted Capsule at a pace that worked, with buy-in at every stage.
Conclusion
For small businesses, digital transformation can feel like a trade-off: gain efficiency, lose character. Cheshire Surveys is proof that it doesn't have to be.
"This transition has worked in a way that we've still maintained being a small business, but we're fully digitized," Louise says. "It hasn't reduced our customer service levels, hasn't made us robots. It's improved our efficiency. That's it, really."
Capsule makes it easy to bring structure to your sales and operations without complexity or cost spiraling out of control. Its intuitive interface means your team can get up to speed quickly, and with the support of a Capsule partner, you can make sure the system is built around the way your business actually works.
Sign up today for a 14-day free trial and discover how Capsule can help your business work smarter without losing what makes it yours.
