One consultant who opens the accounts himself

Why the site is called a teardown

The name is meant literally. Before I recommend a platform to anyone, I open an account and pay for it like any customer would, configure it the way a working team would, run it for a month, and then cancel it to see what cancelling actually involves.

Most CRM advice online is written by people who have watched a demo. A demo does not tell you that the export quietly drops attachments, or that the feature being shown belongs to the tier above the one you are being quoted, or how long it takes to get a straight answer out of support when something breaks on a Friday afternoon. Those things only appear when the account is yours and the bill has your name on it.

The habit started as a way to stop wasting client money on platforms that turned out not to fit. It has since become most of what this site publishes, and it is the reason the pricing research here contains numbers off real invoices rather than numbers off marketing pages.

Why there is only one of me

Working alone is a deliberate choice rather than a stage on the way to building an agency. The failure I saw most often, first as a client and later as a subcontractor, was the gap between whoever sold the work and whoever ended up doing it. You agree an approach with an experienced person, and three weeks later there is somebody else in your CRM working from a scope document they had no part in writing.

Staying small caps how much I can take on, and I turn work away because of it. What you get in exchange is that the person on the first call is the person in your system, and there is exactly one name against any mistake.

How I work

• Nothing starts without a written scope and a fixed price against it.
• Nothing is built in your live system. A sandbox gets a copy of your data, you sign off on what it does there, and only then does it move across.
• Configuration gets documented in plain language, written for whoever comes after me.
• You buy your own licences, so the account stays yours and I am not sitting between you and the vendor.
• If your current setup can be fixed rather than replaced, you will hear that, even when replacing it would be the larger invoice.

How this site makes money

Two ways, and both are worth stating plainly. Companies hire me for the services listed on this site. Separately, some links to CRM platforms earn a referral fee if you sign up through them, which is set out in full on the affiliate disclosure page.

The second one is where readers are right to be suspicious, so here is the rule I hold myself to. Pricing research gets written before I check whether a platform runs a referral programme at all, and several tools that come out well in it pay nothing. Where a recommendation and a referral fee point in different directions, the recommendation wins. A consultancy that steers clients onto the wrong CRM does not get a second project from them, and the second project is worth considerably more than any signup fee.

What I will not take on

Work I cannot do properly. If your project needs a team, a certification I do not hold, or deep knowledge of a platform outside the nine I work in, you will hear that on the first call. Saying so costs me one project. Taking it anyway would cost you a great deal more than that, and it tends to be the sort of thing people write about afterwards.

I work remotely and take clients wherever the timezone overlap allows a real conversation during your working day rather than a handover email at midnight.