Forest City Memorials used to run on paper order forms and sticky notes. Now Cameron Guest can find any order and see what needs doing, whether he is in the shop or on the road.
London, ON
Two locations
2022
Wholesale and retail inscriptions and monuments, plus foundations, cleaning and repairs.
Paper order forms, a file folder and sticky notes.
Cameron Guest, owner of Forest City Memorials in London, Ontario, started out as a one-man band, keeping every order in a paper file folder and on sticky notes. Today three people at two locations can find any order, and he can send a granite order to his supplier from wherever he is, even in the middle of a cemetery.
The first step after a sale is ordering the granite, and Cameron knows how easily it could slip. A customer walks out, a phone call comes in, and "you think you ordered the granite, but it just completely left your mind." There was no database to check, only whether he had sent the email. Then the family calls to ask when it is coming in. "You look and you're like great, I haven't even ordered it yet." As he puts it, "that's not a fun phone call to make either." Forest City missed an order this way before GordE.
The shop was smaller then, and Cameron was "kind of like a one-man band": selling, keeping orders organized, working on the road and in the shop. The orders lived on paper. "It was literally just paperwork and sticky notes pretty much to keep ourselves organized," he says. "I just had a little file folder beside my desk that I had just labeled A to Z with family's last names and I just store their order forms in there." When an order moved to the next step, he wrote the date on the page. Beyond that, he could look back through his emails to see where he had left off.
Cameron had tried a few general CRM programs on trial. None of them fit the work, which has "so many steps and processes." GordE was the only monument-specific system he tried.
Some owners worry about moving every order onto a new system. For Forest City it was not a big job. "Whether you start from your next order and just do everything from there forward or if you are able to take all your orders and put them in and just go to what step in the process you're at," he says, "super easy to get on board."
Cameron trained the staff, and they were "super on board for it." New people are overwhelmed by "so many steps to remember and so many boxes to check off," he says, and GordE is "something that can basically kind of walk them through those steps for each part of the process." One salesperson, who is comfortable with technology, had it down in about two weeks of steady use. The other took a little longer. Within a month, both had it down and had no extra questions about putting orders through.
When Cameron started using GordE, it was only him. Now three people use it daily, including the salespeople at both locations. Other people have taken on roles in the business, which lets Cameron focus on his own work.
He keeps GordE on his phone. When a salesperson calls with a question, he pulls up the order and sees everything about it. When a customer calls him directly, "I just know where everything is all the time." The sales reps can look up an order themselves too, so he gets fewer questions. "There's just so many orders that you forget about." The same goes when a family calls: orders are there at any hour, in the shop or on the road, so whoever picks up can find the order and give an answer.
"I just know where everything is all the time."
"One of the biggest ways I use GordE as well is to order granite while on the road," Cameron says. Waiting for granite to come in is "one of the longest steps in the monument process," he says, "and you want to get those orders to your suppliers as soon as possible."
After a salesperson makes the sale and submits the order, Cameron can check it and send it on. "I can easily check the order details, choose my supplier and send the order to them even while I am in the middle of a cemetery." It is the same step that slipped when everything was on paper.
Staff work through each order step by step. Cameron says that lets him "trust that all the boxes are still getting checked." Foundations, deadlines and spellings are tracked in GordE, so it is easy to see whether something has been done, or whether you have done it yourself, without digging through emails or relying on your own memory. Orders with pressing due dates are easy to spot, so the ones that need attention first are the ones worked on first. Spelling on a stone can be a nightmare, and because GordE is where the details live, the team can check the spelling there and be sure of it.
Accounting used to mean sitting down in the evening to retype everyone's names, numbers and taxes. Now a salesperson downloads the order details and emails them to Cameron. "I literally just download it, put it into our QuickBooks, and I'm on to the next thing." He says it has caused no problems: "Everything always goes through smooth."
Across the whole process, he says GordE saves him time on every step. With about 10 orders on the go, he puts it at "easily 1 to 2 hours a day."
Cameron's advice to a builder who is unsure is to try it. "Just try at least," he says. GordE can "save yourself a lot of headaches."
Forest City Memorials has gone from one person keeping track to three people who can each find an order at any hour.
Forest City Memorials went from a paper file folder to GordE. Whether yours is paper, a spreadsheet or another system, we can show you how it would fit your shop.