What's really going on

You get leads three ways: the phone rings, someone refers you, or the web form pings. That's fewer than 10 a month across two or three people who already talk every day. The risk isn't losing leads in a pipeline — it's a phone call nobody logged, or a web form sitting in an inbox for two days while everyone assumed someone else grabbed it. That's a shared-inbox and intake problem, not a CRM problem.

What to do instead

1. Airtable (free) — one shared table: date, name, source, contact, status (new / quoted / won / lost), owner. That's your "CRM" until volume triples.
2. Zapier (free tier) — one zap: web form submission → new Airtable row → Slack or SMS ping to whoever's on intake that week. No lead sits unseen.
3. Habit — a 10-minute Monday standup where you read the table top to bottom together. Three people, ten rows, done in a coffee.

Do this today: open Airtable, use the "Sales CRM" template, delete the fields you don't need, and paste in every lead from the last 30 days. 30 minutes, one person.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you HubSpot, Salesforce, or an outbound stack like Apollo or Outreach. Those are built for 20-person sales teams running cold sequences — you're an inbound-led MSP with a founder answering the phone. You'd spend more time feeding the CRM than closing work. Doing nothing costs you the occasional dropped web form and a fuzzy sense of which referrals actually convert — real, but not a per-seat-software-sized problem yet.

When to revisit this

When inquiries cross ~30 a month, or when you hire a fourth person whose job is sales.

The part worth getting right

The one call is where your revenue actually comes from. If it's mostly referrals and repeat clients, you need a contact list and a follow-up rhythm — Airtable is plenty and a CRM would slow you down. If it's mostly cold web-form and phone leads that need quoting, chasing, and nurturing over weeks, then intake discipline matters more than the tool, and picking the wrong "starter CRM" now means a painful migration in a year when you outgrow it. Which channel actually pays your bills changes the whole answer.