Cloud 9 Events by all external appearances was a successful company at the time Nick and Olivia Knoellinger purchased it. Internally, maintaining the edge of this growing business in a growing industry was exposing a host of systemic failures.
Upon purchasing the business, Nick and Olivia immediately understood that in order to scale, major changes would need to take place, beginning with an airtight strategy of doubling down on their technology stack and automating as much as possible. And so, the project began to rebuild the company from the inside out, starting with the technology stack.
From a technology standpoint, the house was on fire. In this case, collaboration was done over a combination of email and text messaging. As for task management? That was nonexistent save for a series of disconnected to-do lists. The going was rough, but things clunked along well enough to get by, albeit with some gray hairs.
Their dated website design did not convey a sense of composure, and lacked many features expected in today’s modern web experience but that is only part of the problem. Cloud 9 captures a lot of data for their customers during their events, the majority of which are weddings. As one can imagine, these datasets are of critical importance to their customers not only in timely delivery, but in fidelity. Enter the file sharing problem: Employee owned devices filled to the brim with event data and nowhere to put it, and a sharing technique resulting in grainy, blurry, low resolution versions of what otherwise are high quality files.
Nick and Olivia were attached to their business at the hip with no means of escape. Amidst all of this chaos was the incumbent need to carry a dedicated phone to manage business communications. Loss, damage or compromise here would be catastrophic and a globally dispersed team meant that handing off communications responsibility was a logistical impossibility.
After a thorough analysis of their situation, we created a side by side multi-stage plan to reboot and rebrand the company’s digital identity without impacting existing workflows or line of business:
Step 1:
We started by purchasing a new domain name, and connecting Microsoft 365 services to tackle email first. As their primary means of communication and the most sensitive of the transition process, this needed to be completed before we could move forward. Thankfully, Microsoft 365 allows a mailbox to have multiple aliases, so once migration was complete, both their new and old domain email addresses routed to the same inbox. This was a lifesaver making transition to the new domain a snap without missing a beat with their existing customers and bridging the gap to their new set of infrastructure.
Step 2:
Creating a centralized management account, we were able to transfer all of Cloud 9’s critical infrastructure from Olivia and Nick’s personal accounts into this central management account, adding a layer of separation between business and personal.
Step 3:
Enter Teams – the Microsoft super app: With the company now migrated to Microsoft 365 services and assigned login credentials, Microsoft Teams could now be leveraged for internal collaboration. This was the next logical step for securely creating and managing projects, tasks, and file sharing in addition to video conferencing, instant messaging, screen sharing, etc. With domain procurement, configuration, email migration and Teams onboarding complete, Cloud 9 Events has the necessary components to begin onboarding to Sparkforge.
Step 4:
Configuring the Cloud 9 Sparkforge instance, our first step here is to deploy WordPress with our customized blend of industry standard plugins, like the Divi theme from Elegant Themes. With the website design and functional testing completed, we integrate our chatbot to take over contact form duties. Funneling all communications and contact requests through this vector enables automatic ingestion of all contact and communication into Sparkforge as a single point of customer intake and response.
By porting in their business cell number to Sparkforge, accelerated by the switch to Microsoft 365 and Teams, Nick and Olivia were able to ditch the spare phone, seamlessly handing off all communications responsibility to the team allowing them to take a much deserved vacation. Their first since purchasing Cloud 9.
Modernizing a business may seem impossible, but breaking it into separate stages makes it easy to understand the stark contrast of where things are, to where they can be in a short amount of time with the right preparation.
By leveraging Arcus Foundry’s deep technical implementation experience, Cloud 9 Events was fully modernized in just 60 days end to end and now have a platform that will grow as far as they will.