Karen Bennett runs a brand strategy and graphic design studio for female-led small businesses. Her work was strong and her clients were happy. The problem sat underneath all of it: the systems running her business weren’t matching the quality and ease of the work itself. We’d worked together before on a Build It sprint to set up her newsletter, welcome sequence and lead magnet delivery, so when she was ready to fix the layer underneath, she came back.
Why did Karen reach out to Unravel?
The day-to-day was held together manually. Some of the challenges Karen faced were:
Invoicing meant building each one in Adobe InDesign and exporting a PDF, which was slow and clunky.
Chasing clients for feedback and payments felt, in her word, “icky.”
There was no project plan a client could see, which made deadlines hard to hold on both sides.
And underneath it all there was no CRM, just a growing business run on memory.
Karen knew she needed a system, and that was exactly the problem. She’d looked at what felt like all of the options, Asana, Dubsado, Notion, and come away stuck: “I don’t know what one’s right for me.” So it had stayed on what I like to call ‘the someday list’.
What she wanted was to move from the systems feeling pieced-together to professional, to build “a really watertight, clear business where people knew where they were” with her, and to hand the parts outside her specialism to a partner rather than face another tech project alone.
What did I do?
Karen worked with me in Unravel and Elevate, my three-month systems build. The visible piece if work was a building out a complete Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and client portal.
The part that makes a CRM actually work is starting with how Karen works, so the build began there: Mapping what each client journey looks like from first enquiry through to project completion, then configuring the system to match her process rather than asking her to bend around a tool.
I went looking for the platform that fit and landed on Moxie, which Karen hadn’t come across. “I’d never heard of Moxie. It’s low cost enough but it fits my needs perfectly.”
The portal connects to her domain, so a client steps into a professional experience the moment they sign on, and invoicing moved into the same place too. Where it used to be InDesign and a PDF and a separate chase for payment, now, as Karen puts it, “the money side and the process to get the job done all feels like one.”
Then the part Unravel and Elevate is really built around: the thinking.
Going deep on Karen’s offers surfaced something she hadn’t expected, a standalone brand strategy service. She’d toyed with a brand audit first, the obvious move, but when she really thought it through “it just didn’t feel quite right.”
What we landed on did, Karen said “To break down the strategy side of things and package that up as an offer in itself, that was quite a revelation for me.”
Once it was on the table, I built the systems around it, an updated nurture sequence to feed the funnel and Stripe set up to take payment without manual invoicing. Karen described the depth of that work as “no stone left unturned in understanding the workflows, offer structure and how systems can best support this.”
Throughout, I sent Loom walkthroughs of each part so Karen could see how it worked and run it herself. “No question felt stupid as you always provided an answer, often in a video showing me how to do things, which has been useful to refer back to.”
As she summed it up, the value came two ways:
What’s different for Karen now?
The system Karen was sure she could never have built is in place and running. “There’s no way I could have set up that system on my own.”
Project management, follow-ups and client communication run through it rather than through her memory, and the steps that used to be clunky and separate now feel like one thing.
She also came out with a new offer she hadn’t planned to launch, and the systems to actually deliver it.
The elevated experience her clients now move through gave her the confidence to do something her old setup wouldn’t support: raise her prices.
“I feel comfortable increasing my pricing knowing I’m giving an elevated client experience.” It has her ready for the work she wants next, too: “it makes me feel more ready for moving to a higher value client.”
The deeper shift is in how Karen sees herself. “I feel like my business has grown up a bit.” She describes moving from “a freelancer kind of view” to “more like a small business owner,” with “a big difference in the mindset,” and a more forward-thinking way of working instead of “just pulling things from the air.”
In Karen's Words
“Working with Lauren has been such a positive experience for me and my business, she just gets it!
She takes a super detailed approach to understanding your workflows, systems and preferences. As well as this, she gets you to think about your business and your offering in a new way.
She is so positive, approachable and responsive and I’d love to work with her again in the future!”
Karen Bennett, Karen Bennett Graphic Design
Tools Used
Moxie CRM, MailerLite, Stripe, Loom.