Work record / Brand / CRM Migration

Moving Common Ground's CRM twice in three weeks

I put Common Ground's contacts into one CRM in April 2026 and into a different one eighteen days later. The first tool was built to chase leads. Our business runs on people we already know.

The seat

I was Chief Operating Officer at Common Ground, and the call to move the CRM a second time was mine.

Sector	Professional services
Type of work	Systems migration
Years	April to May 2026
How long	About three weeks
Through	Common Ground
Credits	Common Ground Jesse Fowler, Chief Operating Officer; chose and ran the migration Robby Prochnow, Ran the migration with Jesse and moved the book to a self-hosted CRM with a reporting layer

What I was brought in to decide

Common Ground is five experts covering capital, brand, technology and operations. Almost every piece of work begins with someone we already know. Think of a developer wanting an estimate, a broker bringing a deal or a sub who bid last season. In spring 2026 what we knew about those people lived in four separate places. There was a raw lead list, the contacts on a phone, years of message history and an inbox. Ask any of them who we knew at a given company and none could answer.

The book went into HubSpot on April 25, 2026. Then on May 6 we made a rule that every third party goes into the CRM, with their contacts, bids, rates and the history of each call and email. That rule showed me the flaw. A funnel CRM wants a lifecycle stage on every record, and a stage means nothing for a sub who bids every season or an architect who sends us clients and never buys anything.

What we did

I decided to move again within the month. The book held only a few weeks of history, and that was the cheapest moment to switch. Bending a funnel tool into a relationship network was the worse option.
On May 13, before a single record moved, we wrote a complete cold export of every object and schema out to plain files on our own disk.
We brought companies over first and people second. That way each person arrived already attached to a company that existed in the new system.
Each record carried its old identifier over, matched on email for people and on domain for companies. Because of that, the move could be run a second time without creating duplicates.
Phone contacts and message history came in as signal only: how often we talked and how recently. No message text went in.
The raw lead list went into an archive outside the live book. HubSpot stayed switched on until the record counts on both sides matched.

Results

On May 13, 2026, eighteen days after the first migration, 3,951 people, 2,934 companies and 3,469 links between them all landed in the new CRM in one day. Every association came across.
Now the book can answer the questions a relationship business asks: who we know at a company, who introduced us, when we last spoke and what they bid.
It has kept that shape since, on one records-and-relationships CRM. Every record carries a key we control, so if the tool ever stops fitting the work, the data leaves with us.
Before any system gets our records now, it passes a test. Bring your own questions. Check that one person can hold more than one role. Confirm you can export everything with its links. Keep a key you control.

The lesson

Move again inside the month, before the wrong system's history gets expensive to untangle.

Stories from this work

Building it ourselves so we could try to break itMy infrastructure partner handed me a blueprint, and I built it in house first so he could attack it.Moving the CRM twice in three weeksWe put Common Ground's contacts into HubSpot, saw it asked the wrong questions, and moved again within the month.Nothing until you winMy advisory contracts at Common Ground rest on an agreed result with no retainer, so my pay rides with the client's outcome.

Questions about CRM Migration, answered

Firm record

Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: CRM Migration on the Common Ground wiki.

Back to all projects