Striker Marketing is a marketing firm operating in a small-town college market — a context where client relationships are personal, trust is built face-to-face, and the sales experience is expected to feel consultative and human, not automated.
When a new owner acquired the company, his first priority was clear: fix revenue operations. What he had inherited was a business built almost entirely on the institutional knowledge of one person. The previous owner had controlled approximately 80% of all revenue-generating operations personally, with his wife managing the remaining 20%. There were no systems to speak of — no pipeline visibility, no structured hand-offs, no documentation that would allow anyone else to replicate what had been done.
For a business trying to scale under new ownership, this was an existential constraint.
Andre "Hassan" Wilson was brought in on a six-month contract to conduct a full RevOps overhaul: audit what existed, identify what was broken, and build the infrastructure needed to run a growing marketing firm without everything flowing through a single person.
A Monolithic Operation with No Visibility
The audit revealed what the symptoms had been suggesting: Striker's revenue operations were almost entirely person-dependent. Hand-offs between stages happened informally, pipeline status lived in someone's head, and there was no mechanism for any team member — let alone a new owner — to understand at a glance where any client engagement stood.
The business was functional because the people inside it had internalized the process. It was not functional as a system. The moment those people stepped out — or the moment volume increased — the cracks would widen fast.
The Digitization Gap
Approximately 30% of the existing workflow could be meaningfully optimized through a single intervention: digitizing hand-offs between stages. Manual, informal transitions between phases of client work were creating delays, miscommunications, and accountability gaps that slowed production and frustrated both staff and clients.
The Human Touch Constraint
Striker's market is not a market that responds well to full automation. Clients in a small-town college environment have chosen this firm in part because of the personal relationship. A purely automated client experience would erode the trust that the business had been built on. The solution could not simply be "automate everything" — it had to thread the needle between internal efficiency and external warmth.
The Audit — Month 1
The engagement began with a complete audit of Striker's existing systems, processes, and workflows. Every stage of the revenue cycle was mapped: how leads came in, how they were handled, how work was handed from person to person, and where information was being lost or duplicated. The audit produced a clear picture of what was working, what was broken, and what was simply absent.
Digitizing Hand-Offs and Building the Central Dashboard — Months 2–3
The highest-leverage intervention was also the most straightforward: digitize the hand-offs. Every stage transition that had been happening informally was rebuilt as a structured, trackable step within a centralized Airtable dashboard.
The dashboard gave each team member responsible for a production stage full visibility into where any current project stood and what was queued behind it. For the first time, reps could see their workload across the pipeline, plan their days around production schedules, and communicate status to clients and stakeholders without chasing information through hallways or inboxes.
The result by Month 3: inbound sales representative onboarding time decreased by approximately 25% — because new reps now had a system to learn, not a person to shadow.
Automating Internal Processes While Preserving the Human Experience — Months 3–5
The architecture was designed deliberately: automation handled everything internal — data handling, stage tracking, proposal management, production updates — while client-facing interactions remained human. Sales reps were not replaced by automated sequences. They were freed from administrative drag so they could be more present, more responsive, and more effective in their consultative role.
ICP Development and Customer Persona Documentation — Months 4–5
With functional systems now in place to handle increased volume, the engagement shifted toward building the front-end infrastructure Striker would need to scale. Sales ICP guidelines and customer personas were developed, giving the firm a documented framework for identifying and targeting its most valuable client profiles — something it had never had in a formalized, transferable form.
The six-month engagement produced a measurable before-and-after across every stage of Striker's revenue operation:
Month 3:
Month 6:
Months 4–5:
The business that had been operationally dependent on two people now had documented systems, pipeline transparency, and the capacity to onboard new staff and new clients without the operation degrading.
The challenge in a market like Striker's is not choosing between automation and human connection — it's knowing exactly where each one belongs. Automating the wrong things in a relationship-driven market destroys trust. Under-automating internal processes burns out staff and limits scale. The architecture of this engagement was built on that distinction from day one: everything the client never sees gets systematized; everything the client experiences stays personal.
The result was a firm that could scale without losing what made it work.
This case study is part of Andre "Hassan" Wilson's professional portfolio. For inquiries: hassan.qaseem@gc-usa.com