A $1.4M contract won and a $500K one saved, on a team of twelve.

At Gap Wireless, Glenn had 80 people, a strong IT lead, a marketing team and a finance team. At ProgUSA he had a few salespeople and one person in the office doing everything. The question was what a small company that wants to grow actually looks like.

His first answer was the old one. He hired fractional specialists from his previous world, at $50 to $75 an hour. It worked, and he could not afford it at ProgUSA’s size.

So he started asking AI instead: first to make an email sound better, then for ideas, then for a plan for how to do the job himself. Over about a year, none of those specialists stayed. Finance now comes down to a bookkeeper and a CPA working four hours a month on tax and month-end. Cash flow, payables and receivables come to Glenn as reports, calendar items and emails that tell him what needs attention.

I started by hiring a bunch of expensive fractional people, and then figured out how I could replace them with the tools.

Glenn Poulos

ProgUSA was twenty years old and ran on twenty-year-old tools. The books lived in an Excel file sent to a bookkeeper once a month, on cash accounting. The website was a template.

Glenn had put SAP into three companies, with HubSpot as the CRM, MailChimp and WordPress around it. What he hated most was that none of it matched. A customer could be “AT&T” in the CRM and “AT&T, Inc.” in accounting. With 2,000 customers, that becomes a nightmare.

At ProgUSA he wanted the customer typed in once. He chose Odoo for CRM, pricing, quotes, invoicing, the website and email marketing, with Microsoft 365 for mail. He brought in an integrator to customise it. Claude now reads from Odoo through its API, which is what makes the rest of this possible.

ProgUSA won a contract with the US Navy worth about $500,000. Glenn had not read all 80 pages. A little way in, he found requirements he had missed on inspection points and on how the goods had to be packed.

He gave the document to Claude. Twenty minutes later he had what he had done right, what he had done wrong and what came next. Claude then found and read the Navy’s operating guides and the government standards, and walked him through roughly a hundred exchanges with the Navy. He sent the emails and pasted in the replies.

The same approach won a $1.4M order from a carmaker, for a custom product outside ProgUSA’s usual market. The tender needed a stack of documents Glenn says he could never have produced alone.

He is clear about the limits. It does not replace a lawyer, and some clauses still go to his Florida lawyer. And it still takes his time in front of a screen.

I didn’t read it. I let Claude read it. Twenty minutes later it came back and told me everything I needed to know, everything I did right and everything I did wrong.

Glenn Poulos

For years Glenn kept a Price Master Worksheet in Excel, where dozens of vendors’ price lists in every format were reworked before loading into SAP, then Odoo. He was proud of it.

Now he drops the vendor’s PDF into a Claude project called Products and Prices. It pulls current prices from Odoo, compares them and adds the new products. Then it asks: everything went up 3.5%, raise it all by 3.5%? He answers and it updates Odoo.

That is the pattern everywhere. A weekly sales sync reads the reps’ reports, pulls the pipeline, writes the to-dos and drafts the emails. It does not send them. Glenn reads each one to check it still sounds like him.

I would never just drop a PDF in, go for coffee and come back to find it updated. It’s not that smart.

Glenn Poulos

A large contract from the New York transit authority was coming up, and it had to be caught quickly. Checking meant logging in every morning, finding the page and searching. Ten to twenty minutes, and the real problem was remembering at all.

A scheduled routine now does it every morning. It covers every bid ProgUSA could go for there, and the ones it lost. SAM.gov, the federal portal, is handled the same way. Of everything he has built, Glenn names bid sourcing as the one that surprised him most.

Another routine reads the inboxes for quotes that went out two weeks ago with no reply, and gives the salesperson a call to make. Glenn is careful here. It does not make any single deal easier to close. It means none is forgotten.

There is now so much running that Glenn built a tracker to follow his own work with AI. He can have twenty chats going and forget which one is waiting on him.

Glenn has one rule, twenty years old: technology never gets in the way of a sale. A slow laptop is replaced the next day. The reps sell. Everything else is support, and that is what he automates.

Claude wrote the tools, hosted on Netlify. A margin calculator takes a vendor’s price in euros, the discount, 3% freight and a 12% tariff and gives the selling price for a 22% margin. Battle cards on 30 to 40 vendors let a rep read up on SF6 gas analysers five minutes before a meeting.

A product configurator picks the standard kit and recommended accessories for a model and copies the part numbers. The rep pastes them into a new quote in Odoo with a bulk add. Buyers often take the whole quote, and the accessories carry a higher margin. In Glenn’s example, a $22,000 order becomes $32,000.

The same tools produce fuller quotes, the same from every rep, with the data sheets attached. And a rep who knows five topics out of six can check the sixth on the phone in front of the customer. A trade-show planner linked to the events in Odoo covers the booth, demo stock, staff and budget.

Whatever you need to be in front of customers, selling products. That’s selling. Everything else is marketing and sales support, and I’ll take care of that for you.

Glenn Poulos

Some of the old hands called the battle cards AI slop. Glenn did not argue. He showed them at a meeting with every rep. The others wanted them straight away and wrote testimonials, and the sceptics came round.

Not every tool stays. He installed Superhuman without trialling it. It started drafting across all his email and took two weeks to remove. Granola and Wispr Flow stayed.

The problem he has not solved he calls monkey in the middle. He copies an email from a supplier into Claude, pastes the reply back, then does the same with the designer and the customer. It is most of why his days are long. He gets up an hour earlier than he used to, works most evenings, and admits that is not entirely healthy.

And most of what he builds runs on his own machine. Tools the whole company shares need proper hosting, security and someone responsible for them. He will not put accounting data anywhere public.

Why do I have to paste the email into Claude, and then Claude writes an email back? That’s where I need help. I don’t have the time. I’m running a business.

Glenn Poulos

The contracts first: $500,000 with the Navy kept on track, and $1.4M won from a carmaker. Glenn’s own output is three to four times what it was, by his estimate. The reps are at least twice as productive. Marketing puts out about twenty times more content, to the point where vendors have asked him to slow down.

The number he watches is gross margin. Every other figure comes out of it. AI shows up there as updated cost prices, updated selling prices, accessories on every quote and no money left on the table.

What it cannot do is get more reps in front of customers. ProgUSA sells to technicians on 400,000-volt lines, not to people browsing software. That part is still a phone call.

If there’s no gross margin, you don’t have a company. Everything comes out of gross margin.

Glenn Poulos

Do not try it his way. Twelve people can be driven by one owner. Fifty cannot. The leadership team needs to agree, then bring in a firm to go department by department, look at the processes, automate what can be automated and train people on the rest. That firm is also responsible for security, and its insurance covers it. At 500 people, build that team inside the company.

If he started again, he would plan it more and spread it less, rather than going at everything at once. In his defence, he was doing it on a shoestring, and every dollar that does not pay a salesperson costs him.

• Put the business on one system first. Odoo is what Claude reads from.
• Use AI for the reading nobody has time for: contracts, tenders, vendor price lists.
• Automate what people have to remember every morning, not only what takes a long time.
• Build for the salespeople’s phones. Tools that help them sell get adopted without a push.
• Keep the final click. Glenn reads every draft before it goes out.