The situation
The team went from 30 to 6 without warning and without my input. I was not consulted on the decision. From that point, the challenge was straightforward: the work still needed to get done across three products — Alltake, SmartQC, and Edge Linking — with a fraction of the people and no performance spend.
The work
The first thing I did was stop doing anything that could be automated. I built a Make.com workflow that connected to WordPress and an AI layer to fetch, process, and publish news content automatically. That removed a significant chunk of daily execution work from the team entirely.
Project management tooling was overhauled to create automated check-ins, task routing, and delivery tracking. The goal was visibility without the overhead of managing everything manually at a time when every hour mattered.
SmartQC was launched end-to-end during this period. The product lets businesses verify leads for a dollar and receive real-time qualification reports. I owned the GTM: positioning, messaging, content rollout, and early traction work.
On the growth side, with no performance budget, inbound was the only lever available. I built inbound infrastructure for all three products: content that answered the specific questions buyers were asking, conversion points that matched the content, and follow-up sequences that could qualify interest without requiring human involvement at every step.
The results
Achieved entirely through inbound, with zero performance spend.
SmartQC launched and generating traction. Team of 6 operating at or above the output of 30.
What I took from it
Constraints produce clarity. When you cannot add people or spend, you figure out what actually matters and build systems around it.