Olanike A. Mensah founded Mosaic Consulting Partners, where she works as a change strategist and fractional chief people and culture officer for nonprofits, mission-driven organizations, and small businesses.
Specifically, she coaches and advises nonprofit C-suite leaders, licenses the Mosaic Culture Clarity® System to organizations and consultants, and helps coaches, consultants, and organizations turn their expertise into frameworks they can use to grow their business.
Most of Olanike's clients come from her network of people she knows, as well as former colleagues and collaborators. That's why she's dedicated to following up and keeping those relationships warm.
And to do it well, she uses OnePageCRM, a tool built for exactly that.
My number one source of business is my network, keeping in touch with my old colleagues, old collaborators, people that I know, and nurturing those relationships.
Olanike A. MensahFounder and CEO, Mosaic Consulting PartnersWith OnePageCRM, she rebuilt and doubled her client base in six months. She also landed the first clients for her new framework design service.
But before that, she struggled to find the right tool.
Google Sheets was the CRM
In the early days, Olanike used Google Sheets to track all her relationships. She also had a sheet with every question she'd ask on a discovery call, and filled it in while the call was happening.
I would just type it in as I was talking. Google Sheets was my CRM.
The spreadsheets worked until her business outgrew them. So she went looking for something better, and ended up giving Asana a try.
Asana was fine for managing projects, but it wasn't much help with nurturing relationships. And it was more or less the same story with the tools she found afterward.
Neither Dubsado nor HubSpot worked
Olanike tried Dubsado, but after building her service delivery around it, she realized it wasn't what she needed. She also tried HubSpot's CRM.
HubSpot was a proper CRM, but it was overkill for Olanike’s small business needs.
HubSpot does have actual CRM tools and whatnot, but for a small shop like me, it was way too much for what I needed.
Full email integration and follow-up reminders
Olanike stepped back from business for over a year due to health reasons. When she returned full time, she needed to reconnect with her network, the source of most of her work.
A lot of my licensing and framework design work starts with someone I already know saying, 'I have a method, and I don't know how to package it.' Those conversations only happen if I stay in touch.
So she knew exactly what she needed from a CRM tool. Whichever one she'd end up using had to be able to store her meeting notes, let her set her next steps, and of course, sync with her email and calendar.
I needed a tool where once I talked to someone, I could easily connect and have my meeting notes attached to the record, and then I could immediately give myself the next thing to do, and it would sync with my calendar because I live and die by my calendar.
She heard about OnePageCRM on an entrepreneurship podcast, where a guest talked about it. Two things the guest said caught her attention: the Google Workspace integration and the Action Stream.
OnePageCRM's Gmail integration runs in both directions, so emails she sends and receives are added to the right contact, and she doesn't even have to copy and paste anything. That had been her biggest headache for about a year.
Next Actions took care of the other problem. In OnePageCRM, every contact carries a Next Action, one small task with a date on it. So after a client call, Olanike can tell the CRM she wants to talk to that person again in two weeks or in six months. The reminder shows up on her calendar, and OnePageCRM nudges her to follow through.
The confidence to take more calls
With OnePageCRM, Olanike no longer has to worry about post-call action items piling up and getting behind. And thanks to that, she became confident enough to start taking more of them.
So, she went to more networking events, met up with more people, and most of all, made more promises to stay in touch with them—because she knew she’d actually follow through.
I'm not worried that I'm backlogged and overwhelmed with all the calls I've had that I haven't been able to keep up with or worried that I'm gonna lose track of somebody that I want to nurture a connection with.
She’d had to take time away from the business and had no leads or prospects once she returned full-time. Six months later, she had a growing sales pipeline, built one conversation at a time from people she already knew.
And one of the reasons she could focus on those conversations is that she had an action-focused CRM on her side. It helped her handle the admin that comes with every relationship, while she did the talking.
The right time and the right tool
That being said, Olanike believes that not every solo business needs a CRM. According to her, the question of whether or not to invest in one depends on how many people you're keeping in touch with, and how much of your business comes from those relationships.
For many solopreneurs, a notebook or a spreadsheet is good enough at the start. But the more conversations you have, the more you’ll need to refer to your notes, filter them, and pull reports—things neither of the two can do.
Olanike believes this is the point at which “you need a real CRM. Not a list, not a project management tool that has a contacts list but an actual CRM tool.”