Doc likes to focus on finding new business opportunities and networking with potential and existing customers. He also spends much of his time finding new suppliers of interesting new products, and making sure that the bigger jobs they get are always done to the customer's satisfaction.

A street-smart individual, Doc is somewhat bored by the rather mundane nature of much of his business after all the years he has been running it. Also, he consciously avoids a lot of the everyday administrative work and instead searches for more interesting business opportunities, or just customers to talk to. Doc comes from a fairly rough working class background, as do a lot of young men doing the carpet cleaning for him, who are pretty rough themselves.

Doc prides himself on his business sense and to some degree on his marketing abilities as well. His main advertising expense is running an advert on the local cable TV Guide channel. As a boy, Doc did not care much for academic achievement as he was too impatient to get on with living his life. Skilled with his hands, he has mastered many trades. However, at 45, he knows he is doing a lot of things the hard way at RayDoc, and wants to get the company working smarter. He has hopes of taking more and more of a back seat in the business before too long, and he needs to put more business systems and processes in place before that can happen.

Doc has been hearing about CRM systems from some of his friends and customers for a few years now. Recently, he had a long chat in a local bar with an old friend who owns another small business, who was extolling the virtues of being able to get at all his business information from home, while out of town and even from his fancy smartphone, all because of the new CRM he had purchased. That was it. Doc wasn't going to have his old friend be able to say he knew more about running a business than he did. He needed to find out about this CRM stuff and quickly!

RayDoc has been holding its own for several years now, neither growing nor shrinking. Making reasonable, but not exciting incomes for Doc and Maureen and showing just enough promise for Andrew to stick around, hoping for Doc's retirement. Part of a younger generation of well?educated tradesmen, Andrew has often tried to encourage Doc and Maureen to adopt newer business management tools, but this has been difficult, as Doc has resisted change and Andrew's responsibilities have kept him out of the office supervising on-site employees nearly all the time. However, he will be a willing and supportive ally for Doc in his CRM initiative.

An automated system that documents all of RayDoc's customers and their history with RayDoc is just as essential for Andrew's succession plan as it is for Doc's early retirement.