// The situation

tiny industrial design / product design business in melbourne australia running since 1971. Abandoned a PSA system based on accelo 6 months ago. Using gohighlevel (ghl) and trying to move it to a funnel based marketing system. Thosuands of projects over the years. Lost track of our contact data data for clients etc. with accelo move. haven't got it consolidated. Building a business operating system in fibery to replace our confluence knowledge base. Using workguru.io for project management and Xero for accounting. Running outreach through linkedin via gohighlevel pipeline with 120 contacts at present in it. Another 200 or so in back log and need to add accelo contacts - maybe 3500 of them into gohighlevel as well. Want to backfill fibery wityh client and quoted contacts and companies. All B2B business. Wants to use Fibery as the repository for all important information. GHL is the prospecting tool. Have just started collecting all prosepct research inside fibery as well so that we can track research notes, triggers and contact comms in linkedin and mail. Missive is our mail UI - shared inbox for jobs mainly. All sales activites, marketing activites with me as the owner. One man band, 1 FT designer, 1 pt engineer 1 pt admin who is my wife. 62 years old. Need to somehow make business bigger and earn enough to retire in next 10 years. No exit plan. total survival mode at the moment.

The verdict · Jun 10, 2026

Yes.

You need to fix your contact data before any tool will help.

What's really going on

You're running five systems — Fibery, GHL, WorkGuru, Xero, Missive — as a one-man-band at 62, with a 10-year runway and no exit plan. That's not a stack, that's a second job. The real bleed isn't lost leads; it's you, the only seller, spending evenings wiring tools instead of talking to the 120 live prospects already in GHL. Fibery as the source of truth is the right instinct. Everything else is noise until that's true.

What to do instead

  1. Fibery (already paid for) — make it the contact master this week. One "Companies" database, one "People" database, one "Projects" database linked to both. Nothing fancy.
  2. GHL (already paid for) — keep it as the outbound pipeline only. Sync to Fibery one-way: GHL → Fibery on stage change. Don't try to make GHL the brain.
  3. A Friday habit — 30 minutes, every week, you personally move closed/quoted contacts from GHL into Fibery. No automation yet.

First action, today, 30 minutes: open Fibery, build the three databases above, and paste in the 120 GHL contacts by hand. Not the 200 backlog. Not the 3,500 from Accelo. The 120 live ones. You'll learn the shape of your own data faster than any import script will teach you.

What you're being oversold

Nobody's selling you Outreach or Apollo, but GHL is selling you the funnel-marketing dream — and funnels are for high-volume B2C, not 55-year-old B2B industrial design with thousand-dollar-plus deal cycles measured in months. The Accelo migration already cost you your contact history; a second big-bang import into GHL will cost you the next three months. Doing nothing on the 3,500 Accelo contacts costs you less than you think — most are cold. Doing nothing on the 120 live ones costs you the year.

When to revisit this

When you've personally closed or lost every one of those 120 GHL contacts and Fibery has the notes to prove it.

The part worth getting right

You have to decide what business you're actually running for the next 10 years. If it's a boutique design shop selling to 20 great clients a year, you don't need a funnel — you need Fibery clean, a referral habit, and to kill GHL. If it's a productised offer you can scale and sell, then GHL earns its keep and the 3,500 contacts matter. Those are different stacks, different weeks, different retirements. Pick wrong and you spend year one of your last ten rebuilding tools again.

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