Green Standards Achieves Global Growth and Keeps Teams United with Quickbase
Green Standards helps businesses recycle, resell, and donate unused and excess office furniture. The company serves businesses in the US and Canada, including Fortune 100 companies, such as General Motors and Adobe. This work requires a lot of planning, scheduling, assessing, monitoring, and reporting.
At first, they used spreadsheets and Google Docs to manage their everyday processes. They also had an internal database server with folders for storing their data. Sadly, these solutions presented several challenges, such as lack of automation, poor forecasting, and difficulty in project management. Green Standards needed a solution that all its employees can use, is transparent and can store new and legacy information.
That is when Richard Beaumont, Co-Founder and CEO, discovered Quickbase’s CRM solution. He used online education tools for Quickbase training and later started building apps for employees. Now, all departments use Quickbase in different ways, such as lead and funnel tracking, operations project management, and financial project accounting to name a few. Green Standards employees can now access easily digestible data and plan projects in a way that and ensures long-term growth.
Challenge
- Manual operations (hence no automation), limiting efficiency
- Lack of a real CRM for managing customer interactions
- Lack of data integrity resulting in quality issues
- Difficulty in managing projects using the available tools
- Inaccurate and limited forecasting for their sales operations
Solution
- Implemented Quickbase to all departments, starting with sales
- Automated processes to keep track of every task
- Quickbase provided a single application for unifying teams
- Databased a large network to centralize all operations
Benefits
- Improved sales and revenue leading to consistent company growth
- Continued company growth at a rate of 30-40% year over year
- Reduced costs and improved efficiency
- Enhanced forecasting for sales teams
As a specialized environmental firm, Green Standards works with corporations and government organizations to redistribute surplus office furniture, supplies, and equipment. It started in 2009 to help solve the growing problem of office furniture waste. The company aims to help organizations avoid waste, recover value, and benefit the community.
Located in Canada, Green Standards works with different companies, including over 25% of the Fortune 100 companies, to provide sustainable and socially responsible solutions for furniture and equipment re-use in place of disposal. Inspired by circular economy principles, the company has diverted over 75,000 tons of used office equipment from landfills and made in-kind donations worth more than $32M to thousands of non-profits and community organizations.
Due to their growth, Green Standards could no longer depend on Google Docs and spreadsheets to manage their processes. These solutions had their own challenges, which impacted the company’s performance and productivity.
“Excel is a great tool to have, but the constraint is that there's no automation; everything's manual. So quality is an issue because nothing is protecting your data,“ Richard explained.
The Solution
As such, they needed something reliable and effective to automate and streamline their processes. Green Standards first deployed Quickbase for the sales department, which used it for lead tracking and customer relationship management.
They also use Quickbase for core operations like project management and coordinating up to 150 vendors in North America. Each of their projects flows through stages to ensure quality outcomes. For example, they have a bidding system where vendors bid on projects and then the bids are used to create a master bid, which is presented to customers.
This process is important to ensure clients get vendors that best meet their needs and furniture gets to the right destination. Working with vendors across North America also requires a streamlined process, and Quickbase makes things easy for them. They also use it to rate vendors throughout project phases, which helps Green Standards assign future projects and match the right companies and vendors for all phases of a project.
Green Standards has integrated Quickbase with Quickbooks for efficient finance and cost management. This makes it seamless to manage project accounting and coordinate with the finance team.
“It has given us foresight and the ability to strategically plan into the future and it has facilitated growth by 30 to 40% year over year,” Richard said.
Plans for the Future
As the future unfolds, Green Standards is even more motivated to activate the full potential of Quickbase. This includes making an enhanced app for managing clients, vendors, and recipients of donations. As the CEO, Richard Beaumont expects to do more with Quickbase. Being a self-taught Quickbase user, Richard leads the team in improving the company’s processes.
Using Excel was an obstacle to their ability to grow. Now that they have implemented Quickbase, the possibilities are endless, particularly when it comes to consolidating their vast network into one place.
Richard started learning Quickbase from square one. Even though he had heard about it before, he took interest in it and used online videos, webinars, and newsletters to learn more about Quickbase. Now, he leads the team in deploying apps for different processes and partners in their network.
“Quickbase has been really valuable for databasing these vast networks,” he said.
