Restructuring Spreadsheets - how poorly structured data can hamper a business

I'd like to introduce you to Joe the gardener. Joe is 37 and worked in financial services until a couple of years ago. He was made redundant, but was reasonably happy about this because it gave him the chance to re-evaluate his life, and he decided that he had a passion for gardens and horticulture. So he took his redundancy pay and some savings, and set up Joe's Gardens, whose specialism is redesigning gardens by changing the way the plants use space, rather than doing landscaping. A year ago, his wife started helping with bookings and enquiries, which was great for their lifestyle and because she could help co-ordinate the new people he was bringing into the business to meet growing demand.

Now the business is booming, and Joe's beginning to find juggling all the jobs stressful. He thinks he has the right people, but there never seems to be enough time. He's wondering what to do next.
Now let's look at Joe's business systems. When he started up, he started a spreadsheet containing details of all his customers. He made another spreadsheet with all his one-off jobs, and another one with his regular maintenance contracts. He's pretty computer literate and so had no problem setting these up, and they did the job at the start. But now his spreadsheets are getting massive, and he's got a big folder full of photos which is sorted by customer name. When his wife answers the phone to a customer from 2 years ago, she normally knows the person and can get to their details quite easily, although it can take a while to find everything. But they're thinking of employing an administrator to ease her workload and are worried that this person will never find old customers' details, and the old customers will go elsewhere telling their friends about how Joe's Gardens were great a couple of years ago but seem to have lost their way. Also, scheduling jobs can be quite difficult and a couple of times recently they've double-booked themselves or found that they were paying a contractor for an afternoon of doing nothing. Joe and his wife would also like to be able to predict their earnings, but sales forecasting takes an hour or two each month as Joe sits with has calculator and a notepad, totting up figures from his spreadsheets. Joe's sure there must be a better way and has googled a few things but is a bit bewildered!
Well, Joe is a fictional character, but in this case similarities to persons either living or dead are not co-incidental. Many small business owners, especially those who've had rapid growth, find that their systems are in a similar state to Joe's, and this is where we can help.
In Joe's case, we'd look at putting in three key things, probably staged to spread the cost and get the most pressing issue sorted quickly:

• a log of all past jobs with photos, linked to customers so that a simple search on customer name would bring up all the details of what's been done for that customer
• a schedule so that anyone doing the administration can see at a glance who's doing what, where and when, and slot new jobs in accordingly
• sales pipeline functions so that potential customers are followed up properly and Joe and his wife can see at a glance how much they can expect to make over the coming months

Our system would be available online at all times and will store Joe's key business data securely off-site without any extra effort.
Does Joe's story sound a little like your business? If so, please give us a call!