Sentrex.
Six years turning a fast-growing facilities management business from paper and spreadsheets into one connected Zoho ecosystem. CRM, automation, AI tooling, and compliance, all under one roof.
Visit sentrex.co.uk →A 500-person business, running on paper and instinct.
Sentrex Services UK covers window cleaning, industrial cleaning, and grounds maintenance across the UK. When I joined in 2020, the company was scaling fast, but its systems hadn't scaled with it. Site surveys lived in notebooks and phone photos. Training records were paper files, tracked by memory as much as by any system. A shared inbox handled maintenance requests with no ticketing, no SLAs, and no way to see what was overdue.
Every one of those gaps meant the same thing in practice. Information got lost between the person who knew it and the person who needed it next. Fixing that, one system at a time, became six years of work.
Diagnose first, build second, document always.
My approach stayed the same on every project. Find the real root cause, not just the symptom. Design a system around how the business actually works, not how a generic tool assumes it should. Test it against live conditions before it goes anywhere near production. Then document it to a standard an external consultant could pick up without me in the room.
That discipline mattered because I was often the only technical resource covering sales, operations, finance, and compliance at once. I reported directly to the Managing, Commercial, and Finance Directors. A system that only I could maintain wasn't really a system. It was a liability waiting to surface.
Systems the business actually runs on.
A site survey solution built in Zoho Creator, CRM, and Writer replaced a process that had quietly become the business's biggest source of costing errors. Sales visits were captured in notebooks, written up weeks later, with photos and scope details lost somewhere in between. The redesign added photographic audit trails, scope control, and exceptions handling, closing the real gap between what a site needed and what got quoted.
An Operative Training Management System replaced paper training records across four operative types with a proper Zoho data model. That meant renewal logic, a dual-signature process, and a simple three-state compliance status anyone could read at a glance.
Reactive customer service ran through a shared mailbox for years, handling queries, quotes, and complaints with no real accountability for who had picked up what. A 14-section redesign turned it into a structured Zoho Desk ticketing system, with SLA targets, custom reports, and clear visibility into workload and exactly where things were getting held up. On top of that Desk system, I set up Zia's Field Prediction to auto-suggest ticket fields and Ticket Summary to condense long threads at a glance, and trained Zia specifically on how to draft ticket reply emails, cutting agents' time on repetitive responses.
Where our external Zoho consultancy wasn't available, I built and shipped a live customer-facing chatbot myself using Zoho SalesIQ. I used Deluge scripting and AI to speed up development and debugging.
One ecosystem covering sales, operations, and finance.
I architected the organisation's Zoho One ecosystem across sales, operations, and finance. Then I connected it outward. Zoho CRM integrates with our field service platform to turn won opportunities into jobs automatically. Completed jobs feed back into CRM too, triggering customer feedback requests and review generation. New leads pulling through into CRM route through Zoho Flow first, which checks each email against NeverBounce before it ever reaches a salesperson, so time isn't spent chasing invalid addresses.
I also integrated further client and partner platforms, including Salesforce and BigChange, and built end-to-end workflows across Zoho Flow, Power Automate, and Zapier. On the phone side, I used the Zoho API to connect our phone system through Horizon Integrator, so calls in and out are logged against the right CRM record automatically, and did the same for email through Zoho CRM's built-in Outlook integration.
Some of that automation paid for itself directly. Fuel usage monitoring I built to catch anomalies helped flag potential fraud before it became a bigger problem.
Director-level reporting, without a director writing it.
Leadership wanted reporting inside Microsoft Copilot specifically, even though Zoho and Copilot have no built-in integration. Rather than settle for a workaround, I built a bridge: Zoho Analytics reports are scheduled and delivered automatically, a Power Automate flow uploads them into SharePoint, and Copilot reads and discusses them directly from there. The result gives leadership plain summaries on demand: pipeline health, stalled deals, and what to do next, sourced from live data rather than a report someone had to piece together by hand. New data feeds it on its own, so it keeps working without hands-on upkeep.
Beyond that one bridge, I built several smaller, purpose-built agents rather than one general assistant. One gives managers and directors direct insight from reports without waiting on whoever compiles them. Another deflects routine questions away from a busy finance team and finance director, helping the admin team move through requests faster instead of escalating everything that comes up. Because premium Copilot licensing is per seat and limited, I also built a Microsoft Teams-based workaround so more of the business could use these agents without a licence each, keeping the cost down.
Tools that touch revenue directly.
I built a client-facing price estimator that translates internal costing logic, labour, National Insurance, pension, overheads, and travel time. It turns all of that into a safe public tool that can't be reverse-engineered, with tiered pricing and lead capture built in. I restructured Google Ads conversion tracking to optimise against quoted and won leads instead of raw clicks, feeding CRM data directly into the ad platform. For one of the business's divisions, I also designed and built IceDry, a full AI-integrated marketing website with local SEO and an embedded AI assistant.
Zoho Marketing Automation ran the journeys that kept leads from quietly going cold: one picked up enquiries that had never converted but were never formally marked lost, trying to rekindle them; another re-contacted lost leads 11 months after their original enquiry date, timed to land just before the seasonal window most of the business's work falls into, so the brand was fresh in mind when they came back to compare quotes.
Zoho Campaigns handled one-off sends, seasonal client emails, staff thank-yous, service promotions, until Marketing Automation could cover that ground too and Campaigns was retired. Zoho Social managed every one of the business's social accounts from a single place: scheduling posts and replying to messages without logging into each platform separately. Zoho PageSense tracked how visitors actually used sentrex.co.uk, feeding back into the site's own conversion work.
Fifteen-plus apps, one shared foundation.
Zoho Forms was the entry point for most of this: hundreds built over the years, from lead capture to internal requests, some of which are still public today on sentrex.co.uk/employee-forms. One of those forms fed a Zoho Writer template I built for the finance team, an expense document that auto-generated in exactly the layout they needed straight from what staff submitted, replacing a manual write-up step entirely.
Zoho Projects gave the HR team a proper tracker for every query that came in and what stage it was at, instead of it living in someone's inbox. When Zoho CRM's own storage maxed out under the weight of years of attachments, I moved everything onto Zoho WorkDrive instead, which freed up far more space at a lower cost and let the business cancel the extra CRM storage it had been paying for. Zoho Assist covered the other side of IT support, letting me remote onto a colleague's device to fix a problem without them needing to be in the office.
I set up Zoho People for the whole office: the holiday policy, including an extra day added for each year of service, holiday and sick booking, and time and attendance. Access started open to everyone and was later restricted to office desktops only once it became clear a few people were abusing it remotely. It also ran the business's LMS, where I set up two courses staff could complete for certificates.
Every password for the organisation lived in one place in Zoho Vault under a single master login, and Zoho One's own two-factor authentication was rolled out across every user, which in turn let IT relax how strict password-reset checks needed to be. We also looked seriously at Zoho FSM and Routing for automating sales-lead routing, sitting in on demos and getting hands-on with how it worked, but decided against rolling it out in the end.
Compliance you can actually prove.
I led the move from on-premise servers and paper workflows to fully cloud-based operations. I directed the migration of the business's core field and workforce systems myself. Rolling out a time-and-attendance platform across 500+ staff raised compliance from 65% to 99%, and cut payroll queries to single digits per cycle. I also owned four compliance frameworks with a 100% certification record: ISO 9001, ISO 14001, SafeContractor, and EcoVadis, where I led the business from Bronze to Silver accreditation.
Six years of measurable change.
Across the tenure, the digital transformation work I led supported the business growing from roughly £2m to £12m in revenue. Qualified conversions rose 150% through a closed-loop CRM and attribution model. Valid commercial quotes rose 106% year on year through performance optimisation. Systems integration and automation cut operational errors by around 30%, and client satisfaction, measured through ISO questionnaire scores, rose from 3.62 to 4.38 between 2023 and 2025.