The Laundry Centre is a laundromat in North York. Its owner hired me to redesign the website, and the work grew into marketing. Alongside home customers, the shop washes for gyms, spas and clinics.

Those commercial accounts were the part he wanted more of. He kept coming back to one question: how do I grow the commercial side? I owed him a straight answer before I built anything else.

The easy reply would have been an ad budget. I wrote him an email instead, and the core of it was this.

So I proposed two halves. One was a sales engine to find and reach those few hundred businesses. The other rebuilt the website as a sales tool, centred on a portal for commercial clients.

The portal was meant to be something he could pitch. Against the big linen companies, he could say "every one of my commercial clients gets their own dashboard, request a pickup in ten seconds."

I designed the new site around one goal: a business applying for a commercial account. Home customers still find prices, hours and pickup requests quickly. Every business page, though, leads toward that application.

Gyms, spas and hotels each get a page that speaks to their laundry. Neighbourhood pages cover the delivery area. A visitor can see the client portal preview before they ever apply.

Winning an account was only half the problem. Behind the counter, the owner still tracked orders on paper. A dashboard for clients needed real orders behind it, so the portal had to run the shop too.

I built one app for everyone who isn't a website visitor. Business clients, drivers, counter staff and the owner share one sign-in and one look. Each role sees only the tools it needs.

A client opens a dashboard showing their next pickup. They can skip a day, pause service or ask for a change. Each order has a timeline, and a problem can be reported from it.

Staff start from a Today screen with the day's route, stop by stop. An order board and weigh sheets replace the paper the owner used. The owner's admin holds applications, clients, pickup windows and prices.

The owner set the bar himself: it should feel like Apple, Uber or Airbnb. So actions happen at once, with no confirm dialogs. A toast offers Undo, and staff can still reverse a step for 15 minutes.

Undo had to reach the client's inbox too. Status emails wait a minute in an outbox, so an Undo in that minute cancels the email. Client emails also hold overnight until 7 am.

That covered the half of the plan that runs the business. The other half was meant to find the business in the first place.

The sales engine was planned as a target list, outreach, alerts when a new business opened, and a pipeline view. None of it was built. What exists today is the site, the admin and the portal.

That leaves the portal as a pitch the owner can make, but someone still has to walk in and make it. My email said as much: the contracts come from a sales process.

It's the same idea I already run for my own studio, in a tool called Prospector.