The client
BishopKnight is an M&A firm — the people who bring buyers and sellers of private companies together. The work is relationship-heavy and document-heavy: a couple of thousand companies to track, conversations that run for months, and paperwork attached to every one.
The problem
All of that was spread across spreadsheets and email threads. Two reps working the same market had no shared view, records drifted between copies, and finding the last conversation with a company meant searching an inbox. The firm had also been sharing an install with another business, which made every change a negotiation.
What we built
A standalone CRM, on the firm's own hosting, built round by round with the team using it every day:
- Company records as the spine of the system — a couple of thousand of them, searchable, deduplicated, and owned by a rep.
- Pipeline stages so a deal's position is a fact in the system rather than a rep's memory.
- An activity timeline per company: calls, notes and emails in one chronological view.
- Document handling, so the paperwork sits with the company it belongs to.
- Sector-benchmark valuations, giving a defensible first number in a conversation with a seller.
- Outbound mail that actually arrives — moved onto authenticated SMTP from the firm's own domain after password-reset mail was silently disappearing, plus a DMARC policy on the domain.
- Local-time display, so timestamps read in the team's own timezone while the database keeps UTC.
How it gets changed
Change requests come from the person using the CRM all day, as short numbered lists. They ship live and get answered item by item, usually within the week. That loop — rather than a big specification up front — is why the system fits the way this firm actually works.
The outcome
One system, on the firm's own infrastructure, holding the companies, the pipeline, the documents and the mail. The team works out of it daily, and the requests that come back are refinements rather than workarounds.
What's under the hood
- Laravel + MySQL, deployed to the client's own cPanel hosting
- A couple of thousand company records with rep ownership
- Pipeline stages, activity timeline, document storage
- Sector-benchmark valuation calculations
- Authenticated SMTP sending plus DMARC on the sending domain
- UTC storage with local-time display