What's really going on

You're solo in Chicago, helping small businesses grow. Your own pipeline is probably a handful of warm intros a month, not a flood. The pain you named isn't lost leads — it's tracking billable hours and turning conversations into quotes. That's an operations problem, not a sales-tracking problem. A CRM would sit empty and guilt you.

What to do instead

1. Toggl Track or Harvest (free tier, check current pricing) — one-click timers per client, exportable to an invoice. Pick one today and stop guessing hours.
2. Google Sheets (free) — three tabs: Prospects, Active Clients, Quotes Sent. That IS your CRM at this stage. One row per lead, columns for last contact and next step.
3. A quoting habit — build one quote template in Google Docs with your rate, scope blocks, and terms. Duplicate it per prospect. Ten minutes per quote, not an hour.

First action, 30 minutes: open a Google Sheet, list every prospect and client you've talked to in the last 60 days, and put a date in the "next touch" column. That's your pipeline.

What you're being oversold

Someone will try to sell you HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Salesforce. At one person with a handful of prospects, Pipedrive at ~$14/user/mo would be a tax on activity you don't have yet — you'd spend more time feeding it than closing work. The real cost of doing nothing here isn't lost deals; it's under-billed hours. Every consulting hour you forget to log is money gone, and no CRM fixes that — a timer does.

When to revisit this

When you're juggling more than 20 active prospects at once and forgetting who you promised what.

The part worth getting right

The judgment call is what you actually sell — hours or outcomes. If you bill hourly, a time tracker is the center of your business and quoting is secondary; get the timer right first and the quote template can be rough. If you sell fixed-scope engagements, the quote IS the product — every quote needs a scope doc tight enough that you don't bleed hours later, and the timer is just a sanity check. Pick wrong and you'll either underprice fixed work or lose track of hourly work. Which one are you actually building?