If you’ve ever opened a CRM and felt overwhelmed, you’re not alone. A lot of small business owners can relate to this experience.
You want a CRM to do one thing, but it does 1,000 other things instead.
In 2010, Michael FitzGerald, who was running a small agency, had the same problem. He was doing sales between client calls, quotes, and project work. As a busy owner, he just wanted a CRM that would help him do outreach and follow up. Nothing more.
He couldn’t find it. So he built one himself. That’s how OnePageCRM came to life.
Michael’s agency built e-commerce systems on Magento and dashboards that pulled data from different sources. The team peaked at seven, with a few working remotely.
Referrals kept coming in. However, the team said yes to whatever clients were asking for, which made it difficult to build a sustainable business.
Around that time, Michael came across Mike Michalowicz’s The Pumpkin Plan. The book argued that the way to build a good business was to set criteria for what a good client looks like, turn everyone else away, and focus on the small number you want to grow.
“The Pareto rule probably works here, too. 20% of your clients are not paying you well, but taking 80% of your time,” Michael says. He realized that to grow his business, he had to start reaching out to ideal clients.
“When you don’t intentionally go after a market, you get lots of people knocking on the door, and you become reactive. With a CRM system, I could target clients that I wanted.”
Around the same time, Michael had been reading sales blogs and kept seeing the same line: to increase sales, you need to increase sales actions.
“I actually had to google what a sales action was,” Michael says.
Not a salesperson by trade, he soon figured out that sales actions were simply phone calls, emails, quotes, and so on. The little tasks one could do every day to grow sales.
“I’m an engineer, but I’m a fairly sociable person. So sales shouldn’t be too bad. I just need to know what to do,” Michael thought. That’s why he went looking not just for a CRM, but the CRM that would tell him the next steps for each prospect or client.
Looking for the right CRM was more challenging than expected.
“All I could find were databases. Just pure databases for holding information. No focus on sales actions. Yes, they might have tasks, but they are one of the tabs.”
During the search, he shortlisted three CRMs: Salesforce, Zoho, and Highrise.
Highrise turned out to be more of a contact management tool than a sales CRM. Salesforce and Zoho were too bloated for small agency needs.
But one thing in particular stood out to Michael. Every time he logged in to any of these CRMs, the first thing he saw was a dashboard with colorful pie charts and revenue needles.
“They were menu-driven databases. There are your contacts. Your opportunities. Your companies. Everything was disjointed. That’s why they all had dashboards,” Michael explains. But dashboards don’t tell you what needs to be done next.
“I kept wondering about how I can make my revenue move. When you’re a tiny business, you have to roll up your sleeves and do something. But what is it I need to do in here?”
CRMs with dashboards weren’t the right fit for his small agency.
After a few failed attempts to find the right CRM, Michael did what many small business owners had been doing before him: he turned to spreadsheets.
He built a very basic Excel sheet, with just a few columns: name, Next Action with a date, deal amount, and comments.
The comments were tricky. That column was housing too much information and made it difficult to segment the customer base. As the business grew, more details were added, and the spreadsheet became harder to manage.
“The spreadsheet only temporarily solved my problem. It then started bursting at the seams.”
Once Michael realized the spreadsheet was no longer an option, he sat down to sketch a CRM that would focus on sales actions, not dashboards.
This tool, which later became OnePageCRM, was very minimalist on purpose. It was built for a small business owner with one specific problem, not an enterprise trying to solve multiple problems at once.
Back in the day, OnePageCRM was literally just one page. No pipeline. No email inbox. Just one user and their to-do list.
“We were just bringing focus on what needs to be done, rather than showing charts and graphs that are never read,” Michael explains.
Right after the launch, it became clear that Michael wasn’t the only small business owner who needed such a CRM. The day OnePageCRM went live, people started writing about it.
There was one thing all of these businesses had in common. Their sales were mostly founder-led, done by the business owner (or a very small team). OnePageCRM clicked for them instantly: a simple CRM that didn’t require a sales background and created a follow-up routine.
“This is very common when you have a small business. The owner is usually the person doing the sales.”
A small legal firm in Edinburgh was one of the first users. Their clients wanted to deal with the senior lawyer directly, so the lawyer ended up doing sales too. The firm didn’t need a full sales system. They just wanted something that answered, “What do I need to do for this client today?”
OnePageCRM was the perfect fit.
One early email has stayed with Michael. A small business owner wrote:
“You helped me bring my business from the kitchen table, and I’m now in an office, and I now have people working for me. It’s down to your system, because of the focus it gives me.”
Every morning, OnePageCRM strips down the noise and shows what needs your attention first.
“Pick the right clients and focus on the next action for them. This makes a massive difference”, says Michael. That’s also what sets OnePageCRM apart from other CRMs. It helps you delight your best clients, create a stress-free follow-up routine, and build a financially stable business.
HubSpot was built by marketers—for marketing teams. Pipedrive was built by salespeople—for sales teams. OnePageCRM was built by a small business owner—for small business owners
So if you feel like OnePageCRM was made for you, that’s no coincidence. The person who built it has lived through the day-to-day realities of running a small business. And he still uses the system every day.
