How a Danish flooring company grew 30x with Podio and WorkWays

With the help of technology consulting firm WorkWays, Danish flooring company GulvKanonen used Podio to:

• Streamline quote generation and invoicing, saving hours per day in manual work
• Automate email and upsell motions, generating 5x ROI in six months
• Increase revenue 30x over seven years, while only increasing headcount 7x

Laying the foundation

Ten years ago, Stefan Stojkovic founded GulvKanonen near Copenhagen, Denmark. They offered great sanding, finishing, and planing services, but they really built the company on a foundation of superior customer experience.

As their client base grew, Stefan and team struggled with efficiency. Using word processing software for quote generation and manual calendaring for task booking left the team stressed and operating at max capacity. This bandwidth struggle affected their customer experience, and they couldn’t respond to client requests as fast as they wanted. Stefan went searching for ways to improve their processes.

Stefan found out about Podio through online professional groups and thought it could help solve his problems. Stefan wanted to focus on running the business and serving customers, so he looked for a consultant that could lead the Podio development and implementation. That's where WorkWays came in.

WorkWays is a Denmark-based consulting firm that had years of experience helping businesses achieve growth and efficiency by streamlining and automating processes with pragmatic, low-code solutions. Anders Bendix Kiel, a partner at WorkWays, was then put in charge of GulvKanonen’s transformation.

“We wanted to have something custom, and Anders told me about his Podio experience and how you can build whatever you want and his recommendation on where to start.”

Stefan Stojkovic, Founder, GulvKanonen

Improving the sales process

The first thing Anders and Stefan wanted to address was the inefficiencies that were happening from when the company received a lead to when the customer approved the invoice. Podio was more than capable of helping Stefan and team streamline their processes.

First, Anders created a webform that served as the lead-ingestion method on GulvKanonen’s website. The demographic, task, and preference data from each form submission was stored in Podio and, through a workflow, automatically populated a custom PDF quote that went to the prospect. Prospects receive automated SMS text reminders about their quote to encourage them to take the next steps to secure services. When the client accepts the quote, the lead and quote are converted to a job in Podio, which simultaneously books it to an employee. Once the task is done, an employee marks it as ‘ready for invoicing’ and it’s sent to the company’s accounting system.

Before Podio, these steps were not possible or required heavy manual processing to complete. As a result, Stefan and team saved hours per day returning quotes to prospects and increased lead conversions.

“Podio has really become the business backbone for them. This system gives them a structured process for handling quotes and managing a large number of daily tasks with limited resources.”

Anders Bendix Kiel, Partner, WorkWays

Even with the dramatically improved quote generation process, Stefan still saw areas for improvement. Multiple factors can influence the price of a service in the flooring industry. This prompted the creation of a proprietary, dynamic pricing/quoting model, which enabled GulvKanonen to provide a more accurate quote to their prospects. This model was based on multiple key factors to the business that can influence the cost of a job. This saves time for the team because they do not have to make as many manual calculations.

Improving the service fulfillment process

Stefan was thrilled the improved quote process and the additional output but realized fulfillment of the quotes needed to get more efficient for the company to keep up and provide an exception customer experience. So, Anders built a custom planning interface on top of Podio to visualize and interact with the data in Podio. It includes multiple views that enables Stefan to see which employees are booked for each job, as well as which jobs need to be booked with staff.

The system makes it simple for the GulvKanonen team to monitor their workload at any point and adjust as needed. The entire platform integrates with their custom worker portal so employees can see their jobs at any time, along with the schedule, location, materials, and client information. Anders added to the portal multi-language support as an additional touch, so all information fed from Podio arrived in the worker’s language of choice.

Improving the invoicing process

An additional integration point with Podio is GulvKanonen’s bookkeeping system. Throughout the workday, tasks are marked off in the worker portal as they are completed. Near the end of the day, a workflow automatically moves all completed tasks from Podio into the bookkeeping system to create invoice drafts. Staff members can trigger this workflow manually if they want. A worker can review all the invoice drafts to ensure accuracy, then send them to clients with a simple click of a button. Instead of manually looking through each task and creating individual invoices, the process is automated, saving the company hours of tedious work.

Improving their reporting

Any business owner can attest to the value of accurate and agile reporting, and Stefan is no different. With Podio, he can use every data point to get a better view of the state of GulvKanonen’s business. Anders worked with Stefan to decide which data was important to have available in dashboards to understand how the company was doing. The result helped Stefan get better insights into things like win rate, margins, and budget allotment and helped him see how much his business was growing. In the seven years Anders and Stefan have worked together, GulvKanonen’s revenue increased 30x, while headcount went up 7x, demonstrating the impact Podio has had on profitability.

“Without Podio and it’s automations, my company would be a lot less profitable.”

Stefan Stojkovic, Founder, GulvKanonen

Learn more about WorkWays and GulvKanonen, and how Podio can automate your business processes.