Value-First Team — Client Relationship

Paragon Traffic Management

Paragon Traffic Management provides traffic management services and pedestrian control… — paragontm.co.uk

USS + VFT co-delivery

Snapshot

What they do

UK traffic management — road closures, lane management, signage and safety-equipment deployment for construction, utilities and infrastructure projects. Scunthorpe, England. Mid-market, private.

Operating scale

Around 50 jobs a day. 50+ field operatives. A single job can carry anywhere from 1 to 20 schedules. Tiered pricing with uplift categories for night, weekend, bank holiday and council permit work.

Engagement

HubSpot as the unified operational platform — replacing both the legacy CRM and the messaging layer the business actually ran on.

Delivery

Co-delivered by Value-First Team and USS.

The relationship

  1. Traffic-management CRM assessment. Three paths considered; the chosen one was to make HubSpot the single operational platform.

  2. HubSpot implementation opens — a six-month build begins.

  3. Collaborative build: requirements and hands-on sessions Tuesdays and Thursdays, a Friday review and demo, and a monthly steering committee with formal acceptance.

  4. Launch hardening programme executed. Regression walk completed 26 July.

  5. Go-live.

Where they started

The triggering crisis: they had lost the source code to their mobile app. Forty-two field operatives depended on it every day, it carried known performance faults, and it could have failed at any point with no path to fix it.

The structural root cause, which mattered more: around three quarters of the operation ran outside the CRM. More than twenty WhatsApp groups had quietly become the real operational system. The CRM was not broken — it was bypassed, because it never matched how the team actually works. That is the harder problem, because any replacement that does not match the workflow gets bypassed in exactly the same way.

What it cost, concretely: Friday allocation ran to fifteen hours of manual work. Each invoice took fifteen to twenty minutes. There was no view of profitability at the job level. And Xero sat unintegrated, with figures re-entered by hand for every invoice.

The path chosen (assessment outcome, December 2025): HubSpot as the unified operational platform — replacing both the legacy CRM and the WhatsApp layer, rather than patching either.

What we delivered

Phase 1 — Foundation · complete

  • A custom operational data model built in production — Job (209 properties), Schedule (241), Equipment (113), Vehicle (94), Machinery (40), Custom Price (40), Time Entry (96), Documentation (225). Native objects renamed to the language the business actually uses: Service became Job, Appointment became Schedule, Listing became Equipment
  • The Job Lifecycle pipeline, fourteen stages — Enquiry, Follow Up, Survey Request, Survey Complete, Ready For Quote, Quote Sent, Quote Accepted, Scheduling, Resourced, In Progress, Complete, Invoiced, Paid, Closed. The contracted ten-step inquiry-to-invoice workflow, as built
  • Operational ticket pipelines — Survey Request, TM Drawing Request, Permit Request, License Request, Supply Request. Permits and licences run as tickets rather than custom objects, which keeps them in the flow of work instead of beside it
  • Tiered pricing with the uplift categories the work genuinely carries — night, weekend, bank holiday, council permit
  • Launch hardening — quoting, change orders and the rate card hardened and walked end to end. Full regression walk completed 26 July 2026

Phase 2 — Workflow automation · in progress

  • Core workflows, notifications and business rules
  • The go-live conditions carried out of the July regression walk

Phase 3 — Portal and integration · planned

  • Operative portal — a custom, offline-capable app for the 50+ field operatives: check in and out with GPS, photo upload, supply requests, digital signatures and schedule view. Operatives use it as portal users rather than each needing a HubSpot seat
  • Xero integration — two-way sync for invoices, customers and payment status. Waiting on the nominal codes being defined on their side
  • Dashboards and training

What changed

  • Live on 1 August 2026, and stable since — assessment to running operation in roughly seven months
  • The work that used to live in twenty-plus messaging groups now has somewhere to be. Surveys, permits, licences and supply requests are records with an owner and a state, not messages someone has to remember
  • Job-level profitability is visible for the first time, because pricing, cost and time now sit on the job rather than beside it
  • Paragon’s own team now builds profitability and forecasting reporting on top of the data — the platform holds the business well enough to answer questions it was not built to answer, which is the real test of whether the data model was right

In a sentence

A UK traffic management firm now runs its whole operation in HubSpot — scheduling, quoting that carries real cost-to-margin, and field access for crews on site. Seven months from start to live, and their own team is now building profitability and forecasting on top of it.

At a glance

Delivery

USS + VFT

Buyer role

Ops / delivery

Since

Jan 2026

Key contacts

Connor MooreLicensing & Pricing OwnerDavid MorleyLiaison & AdvisorDanny HauPermit OfficerShay LusbyChris MorleyTraffic Management AdvisorNeilAndyTimJack DavisHealth, Safety, Environment, and Quality ManagerGardinerDebbie CookOperations Admin / Supply ManagementJosh DevanAllocation / Supply Requests