A CRM for a circus
Replaced a tangle of spreadsheets and group chats with one system the cast, crew and box office actually opened every day.
- Problem
- Bookings, talent availability and ticket holds lived in five places. Nobody trusted any of them.
- Approach
- One source of truth, shaped around how performers and front-of-house already worked — not how software wanted them to.
- Outcome
- Daily active use across the whole company within two weeks. No training deck required.
Most CRM projects fail because they ask weird people to behave like spreadsheet rows. This one started the other way around: we watched how the company already moved information, then built the smallest system that made that motion reliable.
What we did
- Mapped the real (undocumented) workflow before touching a schema
- Built the booking and availability model around people, not records
- Shipped a deliberately small v1 and let usage pull the rest
Why it stuck
Adoption was never a training problem. It was a fit problem. When the system matched the culture, people just used it.