Black River Design Build: from spreadsheets to an operating system.
A design-build remodeler that ran on the owner’s memory, four subscriptions and a spreadsheet. Three stages over eighteen months: see the business, automate what they owned, then build Cerebro, the system the company now runs on.
| CRM | None. Spreadsheets. BuilderPrime and Jobber both shipped with a CRM; neither was ever set up. |
| Stack | Fieldwire, BuildXact, BuilderPrime, Jobber. Paid for all four, none talking to the others. |
| Marketing | Under $5k a month in paid campaigns with no attribution. Angi, HomeAdvisor and Houzz profiles unmanaged. Acquisition split across a second website and brand. |
| Website | Basic WordPress. |
| The owner | Was the pipeline, the schedule, the forecast and the follow-up. |
growth
Get every lead, quote and dollar into one place.
We stood up a CRM and made it the front door for every lead, then wired source-level attribution so each job could be traced back to the dollar that produced it. A customer lifetime value model, a forecast with full funnel metrics, a cash-flow forecast and predicted close rates followed, all from data the business already had but had never been able to look at.
The first thing visibility revealed was what was leaking: quotes going out and never followed up, review requests that depended on someone remembering, and a discount workflow that was quietly hurting win rates.
Make the tools they already paid for do the work.
Before writing a line of custom code we built automated workflows inside the CRM to save the office hours every week, and used Zapier to sync data across the separate platforms. This stage paid for itself and bought the trust for the next one.
It also showed where glue runs out. Point-to-point integrations broke silently: an estimate “sent” date was null across every record because three different upstream steps had failed without telling anyone. You cannot run a business on data you can’t trust, and you cannot trust data you don’t own.
Cerebro: the operating system Black River runs on.
Built around how Black River actually works, not how a vendor thinks a remodeler should. One database for contacts, quotes, jobs, construction-phase documents, change orders with e-signatures, field photos and tasks. A shared inbox for customer conversations. Internal team messaging next to the job it’s about. SOPs and tutorials inside the tool staff already have open.
Fieldwire, BuildXact, BuilderPrime and Jobber were retired, roughly $30k to $40k a year in subscriptions. The AI layer came last, once the data layer could carry it: intake automation with an approval gate, opportunity scoring, and an agent that recommends and never writes to production without a person approving.
A walkthrough of Cerebro.
Cerebro is a production system carrying a real company’s jobs, money and customer conversations, so the demo goes out as a link we send you rather than a door left open. Book the audit and we’ll walk the system with you on the call.
The results.
As reported by Black River| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | Untracked | Up 129% year over year, source-attributed |
| Software | Four subscriptions, none connected | Retired; roughly $30k–$40k a year back |
| Visibility | A spreadsheet on Tuesdays | Pipeline, forecast, cash flow and close rates, live |
| The company | Dependent on the owner’s memory | Raising outside capital on the strength of the platform |
Cerebro was designed and built by Massively Useful and is owned by Black River Design Build. Book an Operations Audit →