Value-First Team — Client Relationship

Credit Key

B2B buy-now-pay-later — instant credit at checkout, so business buyers can order more and merchants are paid up front.

USS + VFT co-delivery

Snapshot

What they do

Credit Key is a B2B buy-now-pay-later lender. Merchants offer Credit Key at checkout, business buyers get instant credit on flexible terms, and the merchant is paid up front. Roughly 59 employees. Los Angeles, California.

Engagement

A strategic planning engagement — a full audit of their HubSpot estate and the architecture to rebuild it on, delivered as documents they own outright.

Systems

HubSpot (Sales Hub Enterprise and Content Hub Professional), their own lending platform, and Grafana as the intended reporting layer.

Delivery

Co-delivered by Value-First Team and USS.

The relationship

  1. The engagement opens. The brief was a marketing dashboard — the first look at the data underneath showed it could not support one.

  2. Four working sessions across operations, sales, client success and marketing — five stakeholders, each needing a different view of the same merchants, none of them able to get it.

  3. Architecture and roadmap presented. Then, on the team’s own ask, the attribution picture built from their live data and walked through with them — the honest version, asterisks and all.

  4. The blueprint handed over in full, with the CEO in the room.

Where they started

Credit Key wanted one thing that sounded simple: a dashboard showing which marketing spend was working. What the first look found was that the question could not be answered from the data they had.

Three consecutive vendors had configured the platform without ever designing it. Each added properties, workflows and pipelines on top of the last; none established what any of it was for. By the time we arrived the CRM held hundreds of thousands of contact records that were mostly end consumers rather than business customers, over five hundred properties on a single object with close to a fifth of the custom ones never filled in at all, and duplicate pipelines tracking the same process in two places with the bridge between them switched off.

Nobody could say which fields were reliable. And a mass property reset the previous November had wiped much of the accumulated work, which meant the real risk was not the mess itself — it was that the next attempt would repeat it.

What we delivered

  • A current-state audit of the entire platform — every property, workflow, pipeline and integration, scored for data quality, and rewritten mid-engagement as a business briefing rather than a schema dump when it became clear that was what the room actually needed
  • A future-state architecture — the target data model, what each property is for, how the systems connect, and the governance rules that stop it drifting again
  • An implementation roadmap of six workstreams in dependency order, with success criteria written per stakeholder in their own terms rather than in aggregate
  • An attribution analysis built from eight of their own live reports, naming exactly where the measurement chain breaks and why — including a broken web component that had been quietly recording a false first touch on every page load, invisible to every report built on top of it
  • A working “version 0” attribution view built from their real data and deployed as a walkthrough they could open and click through — the honest bad report, shown as the evidence rather than hidden
  • An executive summary for the CEO, with dashboard specifications their own engineering team could build against

What changed

  • The question moved from “why can’t we see what’s working?” to a named, evidenced list of what was broken and the order it had to be fixed in
  • The measurement gap stopped being a suspicion and became a number the leadership team could look at together — which is what made it possible to decide about at all
  • A false first-touch signal that had been corrupting attribution across the whole platform was found and named, after sitting undetected beneath every report
  • Five stakeholders who each needed a different view got one architecture that serves all five, instead of five competing configurations layered on each other
  • The blueprint is theirs to execute, with or without us — every decision documented with its reasoning, so any competent HubSpot partner can build from it

In a sentence

Credit Key asked us for a marketing dashboard, and we showed them why the data underneath could not support one — then handed them the audit, the architecture and the roadmap to fix it, written so that anyone could build from it.

At a glance

Delivery

USS + VFT

Engaged

Feb 2026

Platform

HubSpot

Scope

Architecture blueprint

Key contacts

John TomichChief Executive Officer Adrian CarlssonVice President of Operations Ben MargolisVice President of Sales Kruger SchaumkelVice President of Client Success