How I Saved a Small Business Owner $10,000 a Year with 1 Week of Code
If you misplaced $10,000 last year, you would tear your house apart looking for it… But a lot of business owners are losing that every year with no change in sight. Here's a case study with a real business owner and how I was able to save them a ton of real time and real money in only a week.
It can feel impossible to choose between revenue growing operations or expense reducing workflows, however, in the era of AI-Powered Software Development, I would argue that you can now have your cake and eat it too. Here's a recent project I did for an Idaho Business owner that was able to both grow revenue and reduce thousands of dollars of annual expenses through a comprehensive data tracking portal.
Many small businesses can't afford full-time developers or navigate tech decisions confidently, leading to manual processes and inefficient systems. My company bridges that gap by providing smart web solutions that save time, money, and headaches.
Back to that Idaho Business owner… They are an ex-football coach that runs an invite-only bowl series for high-performing middle-school athletes. They had a google sheets / google form system that they had been running for the better part of a decade that involved manually updating the google sheet from parent emails every time an athlete would change size over the course of this 6-month bowl. Additionally, because he was the only one who could see this sheet he was constantly answering parents' questions about their data, how much athlete's sponsors paid etc…
This portion of the business was a headache for the business owner and was costing them hundreds of hours of manual work doing basic data entry. It was also costing them their opportunity to grow, instead of creating more football camps around the PNW, they had to update a google spread sheet with John's newest pant size. With every additional football camp he opens (with all else being equal) he would 2x the annual income of his business.
A reminder that a project that saves "hundreds of hours of manual work" annually will bring roughly this value:
| Hourly ($) | Hours / Year (hrs) | Total Amount Saved |
|:------------|:---------------------:|--------------------|
| $40.00 | 100 | $4,000.00 / Yr |
| $40.00 | 200 | $8,000.00 / Yr |
| $80.00 | 100 | $8,000.00 / Yr |
| $80.00 | 200 | $16,000.00 / Yr | To solve his headache, I created a comprehensive login and registration system so that he can send a link to all the parents in his list of selected athletes. From there parents can register and then create an athlete which will automatically save all of their athletes data into an airtable table for them to manage.
There are a few parts of this build that really demonstrate the value of having a technical partner.
- I decided to build out the project in airtable (rather than just a MySQL database) so that the football coach could add more fields and they would automatically sync to the create and update form
- Having a login and registration system ensures that only valid data makes it into their athlete database.
- A standard airtable form does not allow for updates to be made to athletes, so I created a custom form that allows for creates and updates to be saved into airtable.
- I created a form splitter tool that allows the business owner to map certain fields to certain forms (Idaho HS input is only visible for the Idaho football form). That way if they decide to add more camps in other states they can easily update it without needing to write code.
Sometimes people think custom code will introduce complexity into their business because they may not have the technical know-how to troubleshoot and fix issues as they arise. Prior to implementing this custom code, this business owner was likely losing over $10,000.00 / year, or at least hundreds of hours of their valuable time, to this particular inefficiency. This business owner was one of many out there with labor-intensive manual processes they're familiar with but that are bleeding money for the company. If you think you could benefit from a technical analysis, please reach out for a custom consultation on your business' data flow!