Matt Dart built a web-based job planner for a real-estate styling business that was drowning in spreadsheets and manual coordination. The system tracks furniture inventory, generates checklists for removalists, and centralizes job details, saving the owner 20-30 hours weekly. The custom build took 30-40 hours and uses Airtable, Claude Code, and n8n.
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Hey, what's going on? Episode 133 today. I hope you guys are having an epic week so far. This episode is a live case study of a client that we're working with right now. I'm gonna show you what their problems were with their business in terms of time, and then I'm gonna go through how I've been able to get back almost 3 days a week of time for this individual. So we're literally just about to finish this process off. There's just a couple of things we need to do for the testing side of things, but I'm gonna go through, you know, obviously what type of business it is, what they were doing manually, and how I was able to build out a system or a software which I built from scratch and what that might look like to give you guys some ideas. So this business is in real estate. So what they do, they do the styling for properties when people want to sell. So it's like commercial styling, I suppose. I'm not sure what the exact name is. But essentially, when someone wants to sell, she's got a warehouse of furniture, and she'll basically design where everything goes. So it looks, looks nice. So when people come in to see if they wanna buy it, in theory, it'll increase the value of the property because it'll, it'll look a lot nicer than just having an empty house. So that's what she does. So What was currently happening, everything was done manually. So what would happen is she has like a Google Drive of all the pictures of each piece of furniture, and she would manually look at the Google Drive to see what she's got. And she'd also just have to go off memory on what is actually available to use. Then she would design it in a, in a, like a different software. And then what would happen is she would then go to the warehouse and tell the removalist. So she'd have to meet the removalist at the warehouse and tell them what they need to pick up to make sure they've got everything. Then she'd have to go to the property itself and then tell the stylist where everything goes. So everything was relying on her essentially as the business owner, plus she was doing everything else as well, all the admin, all that type of stuff. So what I have built for her, and I'm going to share my screen and show you a little bit of what that looks like without, you know, giving away everything that she's got. Essentially what I've built is a custom app that essentially— well, not so much an app, but like a custom server, I guess, where she can put in a— put it like a job together, like a job planner. It's got all the live furniture that she's got, whether it's out on hire, whether there's 2 left out of 6. So it shows the live availability. And then that actually creates a checklist for the removalist to pick up from the warehouse because the removalist knows where everything is at the warehouse. Then it's also got a returning checklist. So when they drop it off, that also generates the checklist for them to mark that they've returned this. So this alone doesn't require her to be in the warehouse anymore. At all. Now the next stage, this can also then go to the stylist. Now the next stage for us to, to do this is getting like all the design and stuff, being able to access that remotely so the stylist can just design it or put everything in the right spots with the removalist. So then she won't have to be at the property itself. That's the next step. For us. But let me just take you behind the scenes here. I'll just share my screen real quickly. And let's go here. And I'll quickly just show you like behind the scenes of what it looks like. So this is like a job planner. So they'll put in the job details, install date, which is when they need to have the furniture in, the start time, the return date, the return time, the removalist, and the stylist. And you can see here we've got all the furniture, and there's obviously heaps and heaps of bits of furniture. In here. So this is all loaded in live with live availability. So you can obviously search by dining chairs, bar stools, tables, etc. It's got all the pictures in there. And then you've also got a live tab of all the jobs that are currently out, which my computer's just taking its time to load this. I'll give it a second to to load. But here we go. So this tells you what streets are out, when the expected return date is, and how many actual items are actually out. So if I just click on one of these, it tells us all the items that are out right now as live availability, which is so, so good. So it just gives us, or gives her a really good understanding of what's currently not available. So she can see everything that she's used. instantly, and she can obviously change the return date if she needs to as well. So this is— I've built this completely from scratch. So let me explain how I've actually done this. So I've done most of it in Claude Code, like, so like vibe coding. So there's been a few iterations of this just depending on exactly what she wanted, but everything was built in Claude Code, and all the automations were actually built in N8N, which is just an automation software that connects different apps together. So in terms of time, in terms of how much time this took to build, I would probably say so far it's probably like 30 or 40 hours to be able to build this because I needed to basically download everything from the Google Drive, put it into Claude Code, and then what we did there didn't really work the way that it needed to. So we had to do it using new software. So we use Airtable store the live availability. And then we connect N8N to Airtable, then to the software that I built, um, for live availability. Um, the checklists are all generated directly through, um, the software that I've built. So again, this is completely custom, custom build, something that we do, uh, for some business owners. Um, but we only work with 4 or 5 people at a time, um, just because there's so much work, uh, involved. So If this sounds like something that you want more or you want to learn more about, we do offer this service, but it's only for 5 people at a time. At this current moment, we've got 1 spot left. If you guys want some custom-built softwares, whether it's AI or whether it's a software like this, which is a combination of both, but this software itself, once it's finished, should get back. You know, 20, 30 hours a week, if not, if not more. So I just wanna give you guys like a live example of some of the things that I've been working on for some other businesses. But in reality, if you're doing, if you're doing a lot of stuff manually, then chances are we'll be able to get back a fair bit of your, of your time, whether it's AI agents, whether it's just standard automations or workflows, or whether it's something like a custom build like this. So we've got 2 different types of services. We've got a done-for-you, which is what I'm talking about right now, and then we've got a done-with-you where I just teach you how to actually do these things as well. So click on the description below if you want more information. You can check out all the information and make a decision from there. But you have to apply to work with us. We don't take on everyone. So if you apply and it's a good fit, then we'll discuss more. But if not, it's completely fine as well. So that's it for today's episode. I'll see you next week. Bye for now. Bye.
