The old CRM held a decade of history hostage.
A $15M roofing company had outgrown its legacy CRM and picked a new one. Then the move stalled, because the old system had no export tool and no API. Ten years of customer records, job history, and file attachments sat behind an interface built for one person clicking one record at a time.
The only path the vendor left open was manual: office staff opening thousands of customer profiles, one by one, downloading every attachment by hand. The company estimated it at weeks of full-time work, on top of the actual jobs those people were hired to do. That estimate is why companies stay on software they hate. The switching cost looks worse than the pain.
An automation that worked the old CRM like a very patient employee.
When software has no export tool, there is still one interface that always works: the one the staff uses every day. We built a custom automation that drove the old CRM's screens directly. It signed in, walked every customer record, pulled the history, downloaded each attachment, and staged all of it for the new system.
It did what the office staff would have done by hand, except it never stopped, never misfiled anything, and ran while the building was empty. We started it on a Friday. By Monday morning the new CRM was live with ten years of history in it, and nobody on staff had touched the migration.
This is standard practice in enterprise automation, where locked-down legacy systems are the norm and driving the interface is often the only way in. It's the kind of work our founder did at Fortune 500 scale before Larken. The difference here is who it was pointed at: a roofing company's front office instead of a corporate IT program, on a timeline measured in days.
- Weeks of manual work reduced to one weekend
- Ten years of history and attachments preserved
- Zero staff hours spent on the migration
- New CRM live Monday morning
Most service businesses have some version of this problem: a system everyone depends on and nobody can get data out of, or a chore that eats staff hours because no off-the-shelf tool fits. Off-the-shelf is where we start when it works. When it doesn't, we build the thing that does, the same way we did here. That's the core of our automation practice: enterprise-grade tooling pointed at the front office of an owner-led business.