What it is
Common Ground is five experts working across capital, brand, technology and operations, and its work almost always starts with a person the firm already knows: a developer who needs an estimate, a broker with a deal, a sub who bid last season. In spring 2026 that knowledge sat in four places, a raw lead list, a phone's contacts, years of message history and an inbox, and none of them could say who the firm knew at a given company.
On April 25, 2026 the book moved into HubSpot. A May 6 rule that every third party goes into the CRM, with contacts, bids, rates and the history of every call and email, exposed the problem: a funnel CRM kept asking for a lifecycle stage that did not apply to a sub who bids every season or an architect who refers clients and never buys.
What Common Ground did
- Fowler chose to move again inside the month, while the book held only weeks of history, rather than bend a funnel tool into the shape of a relationship network.
- Before anything moved on May 13, a full cold export of every object and schema went to plain files on the firm's own disk.
- Companies moved first and people second, so every person landed attached to a company that already existed.
- Every record kept its old identifier, matched on email for people and on domain for companies, so the move could run twice without creating a duplicate.
- Phone contacts and message history were mapped in as signal only, how often and how recently, with no message text.
- The raw lead list stayed in an archive outside the live book, and HubSpot stayed live until the record counts on both sides matched.
Results
- 3,951 people, 2,934 companies and 3,469 associations between them landed in the new CRM in one day, on May 13, 2026, eighteen days after the first migration, with every association carried.
- The book now answers relationship questions: who the firm knows at a company, who introduced them, when they last spoke and what they bid.
- The relationship book has held its shape since, on one records-and-relationships CRM, and every record carries a key the firm controls, so the data moves with it if the tool ever stops fitting the work.
- A standing test before any system gets the firm's records: bring your own questions, check that a person can hold more than one role, confirm a full export with links, and keep a key you control.
External links
- Official website: Kinetic ML
- Public data room: Kinetic ML: a work study for a small marketing company data room
Stories from this work
At a glance
| Project type | Systems migration |
|---|---|
| Industry | Professional services |
| Seat | Chief Operating Officer, Common Ground |
| Ran through | Common Ground |
| Dates | April to May 2026 |
| Duration | About three weeks |
| Official website | Kinetic ML |
| Public data room | Kinetic ML: a work study for a small marketing company data room |
| Related pages | Common Ground |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |