Why

Fire engineering consulting in Norway is high-ticket, low-volume, relationship-driven work. With <10 inquiries/month and just you, your bottleneck isn't tracking — it's making sure no referral phone call slips between "I'll email them tomorrow" and three weeks later. A CRM would become a tab you forget to open. What you need is a single place where every phone call and email lands as a row, and a weekly habit of looking at it.

Where the leads actually live

1. Google Sheets or Apple Numbers (free) — one sheet, "Henvendelser 2026", columns: Dato / Navn / Selskap / Kanal (referral/phone/email) / Prosjekt / Estimert verdi / Neste steg / Frist. One row per inquiry, every inquiry, no exceptions.
2. Apple Reminders or Google Tasks (free) — for every row in the sheet, set a dated reminder for the "Neste steg". Phone call ends → reminder set before you put the phone down.
3. A habit — Friday 20-minute gjennomgang — every Friday before you log off, open the sheet, action anything where "Frist" is in the past or this coming week. Send the email, make the call, or kill the row.

Do this today

Open Google Sheets, create a sheet called "Henvendelser 2026" with the eight columns above, and paste in every inquiry from the last 30 days from your email and phone log. Bookmark it in your browser's toolbar so it's one click from your inbox. By tonight every live inquiry is in one place and you can see which ones you've gone quiet on.

What to ignore

Skip HubSpot Free, Pipedrive (~kr 200/mo), and Zoho Bigin — all built for multi-person sales teams with weekly pipeline reviews, not a solo consultant with 5-8 referrals/month. If anyone pitches you Salesforce Essentials or a "fire engineering vertical CRM", that's noise. You don't have a tracking problem at this volume; you have a "did I reply to Lars from Multiconsult yet" problem.

What doing nothing costs you

At <10 inquiries/month in Norwegian fire engineering, even one dropped referral per quarter is likely a six-figure NOK project plus the referrer who quietly stops sending you work. The compounding loss is reputational — referral sources don't tell you they've stopped.

Where this leaves you

You've got the sheet, the reminder loop, and the Friday review. The plan would add a Norwegian-language email template for the "thanks, here's my scope and rate" first reply, a phone-call script so the row gets created before you hang up, and a recovery move for the Friday you skip the review — because at one person you will skip it, probably in week three.

When to revisit this

When the sheet passes 200 rows, or when you bring on a second engineer and both of you are answering the same inquiries.