Cakes by hand. Half the admin.
A Fortitude Valley bakery running every order on phone calls and a hand-kept calendar. Now the orders schedule themselves.
- Client
- Project lead
Trav WhiteFounder and Head of AI Engineering
- Industry
- Bakery
- Location
- Fortitude Valley, Brisbane
- Solution
- Sales automation
- Award
- 2021 Impact Awards
01 The briefGive the bakery a CRM for its customers, schedule every order into the calendar automatically, text customers as their order progresses, and show performance and capacity on one dashboard.
Every order, managed by hand.
Cakes & Sh!t is a bakery in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, known for decadent, sugary and deliberately rude creations. Orders came in through its WooCommerce website, and there were more of them every month.
Trav and the owner, Sam Fitzpatrick, were neighbours on Bakery Lane and met through a shared love of French bulldogs. Over a cupcake, Sam explained that the business was struggling to manage its growing number of orders.
It stayed that way because there was no system underneath to automate. The website stood on its own, there was no CRM and no order automation. Sam phoned customers to tell them how their order was going, typed pick-ups into her calendar as they came in, and worked out how the business was doing from data that did not connect. The team spent the first few hours of each morning reviewing recent deals just to plan the day.
That meant less capacity for baking, less contact with customers after they bought, and fewer of them coming back. Trav had hit the same problem managing enquiries for his own online store, and left the meeting with a plan to automate it.
Three jobs done by hand
- Order updates. A phone call to each customer as their order moved along.
- The daily schedule. Pick-up dates typed into a calendar on the fly.
- How the business was going. Pieced together from reams of disconnected data.
Starting from scratch.
With no CRM and no automation to work around, the whole order process could be written again. Four stages, in the order we ran them.
A fresh platform, HubSpot, from nothing
A CRM to hold every customer's contact details, report on them and tell past customers about future promotions, while the service stays personal.
A CRM where there had been none
Sales pipeline workshop, With the Cakes & Sh!t team
Every stage the team already used, however loosely named, broken down into what it meant to them and what should move an order on to the next.
The existing process, understood first
Two pipelines, mapped in Miro, Web and bakery
An eCommerce pipeline that follows each order through the website, and a Bakery pipeline that follows each order's progress in the kitchen.
Every order followed from both sides
A suite of integrations, All joined to HubSpot
WooCommerce for orders, Google Calendar through Zapier, Sakari for texts and Databox for reporting, each working from the deals in HubSpot.
Four tools and one CRM
| The job | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Order updates | A phone call from Sam | A text as the order moves |
| Pick-up dates | Typed into the calendar | A calendar entry from each order |
| Planning the day | The first hours of the morning | Half the time |
| How it is going | Disconnected data | A Databox dashboard |
HubSpot onboarding and support
The CRM, set up where there had been none.
- HubSpot CRM set-up and onboarding
Sales and CRM
Two pipelines, and the texts that go out from their stages.
- eCommerce pipeline build
- Bakery pipeline build
- Automatic SMS sending in deal stages
Websites and integrations
Four tools joined to HubSpot.
- WooCommerce and HubSpot
- Sakari and HubSpot
- Google Calendar and HubSpot
- Databox and HubSpot
The routine information is automated now.
Running orders on phone calls and a calendar?
One order, four tools and one CRM.
An order placed on the website sets everything else moving.
Why the Bakery pipeline is marked. It keeps each order's pick-up date, product and progress, and the calendar, the texts and the dashboard all work from it.
What the customer sees, and what the team sees.
The texts and the dashboard as they were published with our original case study, and the pipeline map from the build.
How the four goals turned out.
What Cakes & Sh!t wanted when we started, and how each one looked once the integrations were running.
Goal 01
See every new lead and how it moves through the sales process
We set up HubSpot as the CRM, so every WooCommerce checkout makes a deal in the eCommerce pipeline and an order in the Bakery pipeline.
2
pipelines following every web order, from checkout to pick-up. One follows the order through the website and the other follows its progress in the kitchen, so the team can see where every order is.
Goal 02
Put the team's time into the work with the biggest impact
We connected four tools to HubSpot, with Databox reading the pipeline so the team can plan its time around what is coming.
35%
more capacity across the team. The integrations did it together: WooCommerce for orders, Google Calendar for the schedule, Sakari for texts and Databox for reporting.
Goal 03
Take as much of the admin off people as possible
We set up Zapier to put each order into Google Calendar from its pick-up date, so nobody reviews the day's deals by hand to plan the morning.
50%
less time spent on internal admin. The first hours of each morning used to go on reviewing recent deals just to plan the day.
Goal 04
Text customers as their order progresses
We set up Sakari to text from HubSpot after the purchase, when the order goes in the oven and when it is ready to pick up.
30%
rise in the rebuy rate, helped by the order texts. The texts took over the job Sam's phone calls used to do, and each one is another reason to come back.
Setting up the day takes half the time. Each order goes into Google Calendar from its pick-up date, so nobody builds the day's schedule by hand.
The routine information around each order is now automated, from checkout to pick-up. The team spends less time on admin, has 35% more capacity, and more customers come back to buy again.
With Databox connected to HubSpot, the team can keep tracking its capacity in real time and set its own targets to improve against. We are no longer neighbours on Bakery Lane, but Sam is still very much part of the Neighbourhood.
“[Our process] is so much different thanks to you guys. In order for us to get the level of automation and automatic communication across calendars and CRMs, you guys needed to get a bit creative and make a whole bunch of different programs talk to Hubspot - which is awesome. ... [The project] has taken all the routine information - that no one wants to do anyway - and has automated it. So good!”
Sam Fitzpatrick
Owner, Cakes & Sh!t
Who ran it
Trav WhiteFounder and Head of AI Engineering
Led the automation plan, the two pipelines and the four integrations that joined the bakery to HubSpot.
HubSpot Certified Trainer, Multi HubSpot Impact Award winner, Founded Neighbourhood in 2015
Too busy with admin to do the actual work?
The neighbours next door.
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