The CRM
One system to run an entire agency
About Centauri Media
Centauri Media is a creative agency with two sides: a marketing arm (influencer and UGC campaigns, social content, brand and print design) and a software solutions arm (websites, mobile apps, AI automation and CRM builds). It grew from a three-person startup into a 20-plus person team in a couple of years, and the inboxes and spreadsheets it ran on stopped keeping up with the work.
Objectives
- Replace scattered inboxes, spreadsheets and tribal knowledge with one system the whole agency runs on.
- Model both sides of the business in one place: the marketing work (leads, clients, shoots, talent, content) and the software delivery (projects and tasks).
- Give each team a focused view on that shared data, from a lead pipeline to production scheduling to a client portal.
- Take the repetitive admin off people's plates with automations and AI.
- Control access with role-based permissions as the team grew.
Results
The Challenge
Leads lived in inboxes, finances in spreadsheets, and shoot schedules and delivery status in people's heads. Nothing joined up across the two sides of the agency, marketing and software, so nothing could be trusted, reported on, or automated. Growth was multiplying the chaos rather than the output, and the company needed a single source of truth before it could scale any further.
The Approach
The core decision was to build around one model, not one screen at a time. Everything the agency does, across both arms, had to live in a single schema, so the real work was getting that shape right before any interface sat on top of it. Once the model held the whole business, each team's view became a focused read of the same records, and reporting and automation stopped being integrations and became almost free.
The Solution
The whole agency is modelled as one database, with focused surfaces built on top: a lead pipeline, production and shoot scheduling, talent management, a software-projects board, finance and billing, and a client portal. Because every view shares one source of truth, reporting and automation came almost for free, and AI could be layered onto the work that used to eat hours by hand.
Built on Next.js and Supabase, with the whole agency modelled as one database and role-based access controlling what each team sees. The repetitive work, capturing enquiries, syncing between tools, publishing on a schedule, runs as background automations rather than by hand, and an AI pipeline drafts content in the CMS.
An agency scaling faster than its tooling
Centauri runs two businesses at once, a marketing arm and a software arm, and both were held together by inboxes, spreadsheets and status kept in people's heads. Nothing joined up, so nothing could be trusted or automated, and growth was multiplying the chaos rather than the output.
- No single view of the client lifecycle across marketing and software
- Financial tracking disconnected from delivery
- Repetitive internal admin done by hand
One model, every workflow on top of it
The whole business is modelled once, then each team gets a focused surface on that shared data: a lead pipeline, production and shoot scheduling, talent management, a software-projects board, finance, and a client portal. Because everything shares one source of truth, a client's whole history sits in one place and reporting and automation came almost for free, with no exports and no two systems that quietly disagree.
- Leads, clients, shoots, talent and software projects in one place
- Finance tied directly to the work it bills for
- Role-based access as the team grew
One shared model couples the parts: change how a lead is shaped and it ripples into finance and delivery. The upside is a single source of truth the whole team can reason about; the cost is that no view is ever fully independent of the others.
The repetitive layer runs itself
The parts of agency life nobody wants to do, capturing enquiries, syncing between tools, publishing on a schedule, run as background automations instead of by hand. An AI pipeline drafts content in the CMS. The team spends its time on client work, not admin.
Technologies
Conclusion
What started as a fix for spreadsheet sprawl became the system the agency runs on day to day, and a direct contributor to over £30k of new project revenue in its first six months. One shared model turned scattered work across both sides of the business into something the team could trust, report on, and automate as it kept growing.
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