Advising: Tech Stack Selection and Migration for Events Mgmt

A busy events management company in Texas, USA. 1 full-time owner, 2 part time staff, and 50+ event staff managing anywhere from 1-5 events every week, especially busy through Spring.

When they came to me, they had been assessing if Dubsado or Honeybook was right for them for almost a year. They were working in Trello for project management but realized they were growing quickly and the manual inputs into Trello were not going to scale well.

I explored how they were using Trello, and interviewed the founder to determine her most important features, biggest time-sucks, and future ambitions for the business.

Then I assessed and completed my report determining if Dubsado, Honeybook, or an alternative could be best for her business.

Together, we selected Monday.com to use both the project management and the CRM side of the product.

Phase 0: Migrate data from Trello into Monday, migrate event talent profiles from Google sheets into Monday. Creation of all relevant fields, plus a couple of powerful new fields.

Phase 1: Create a Monday form to replace the form on their website. With their previous workflow, form submissions would come to the founders email, she would manually copy and paste into Trello. No longer! The Monday form will be embedded on site, and all submissions will flow directly into Monday where they can be sorted, delegated, and communicated easily with the team.

Phase 2: Integrations & Automations Part 1. One of the reasons we selected Monday.com was I knew how easy it was to automate. This is principle to how I run my business: I select software that I believe my clients will be able to manage and automate their own so that they don't need to depend on specialists like me long-term or full-time. But I soon faced trouble. The most important integration & automations we needed would send booked events from Monday to the Google Calendar, adding staff and important event details along the way. What I didn't know yet was that the Monday<>Google Calendar integration is awful, buggy, and caused a mess of duplicate events. So we pursued Zapier to have more control over that connection, and the Monday <> Quickbooks integration for payment tracking. Keep reading for more on how that went...

Phase 3: Training & Soft Launch. As I always do, I send training resources, screenshares, tips and tricks to the team members along the way so that they know how and why things are set up the way they are. We got the 3 team members into Monday.com just before busy season began. And they all seemed to get comfortable very quickly. All was well until...

Phase 4: Integrations & Automations Part 2. Their biggest, busiest month of the year was upon us when we realized Zapier was not working the way we needed it to. I tried a few solutions on my own before seeking help from Zapier's Support Team. Then it was 6-8 weeks of back and fourth between Zapier Support & Monday Support blaming each others APIs for the bugs that were happening in our automations. Despite escalations to engineering teams and some pretty committed support teams, no one could find a fix for what was happening. SO...

We quit Zapier. I found relay.app and had been testing it out on my own business for months to ensure I was confident it would work for this client and others. And so far, it is! It's more affordable for my client, it's been easy for them to onboard and edit automations themselves because the UX is so simple, the options available to us within automations (triggers, filters, steps) are much better than Zapier, AND when we have faced a bug, the small but mighty team at relay.app is uber responsive.

In the end we have:

A scalable tech stack

A more affordable and practical Zapier competitor

An open space where the team members can cover for each other, have event info on the go via the moble app, so no one is left in the dark on important updates

100+ events migrated from Trello to Monday

30+ event staff roster migrated from spreadsheets to Monday

35+ automations running daily or weekly

We've lost count, but I believe its 750+ tasks have been automated since June 2024. Just 4 months now.