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Marta from Northline Cabinetry (Grand Rapids, MI) cut a $2,000 walnut slab on a bounced check nobody caught. Hear how a spiral notebook, a shared Gmail inbox, and a whiteboard shop schedule nearly sank a 12-year custom cabinet business — and what actually fixed it.
Marta, co-owner of Northline Cabinetry in Grand Rapids, Michigan, joins the show to walk through the moment a bounced check — buried under 11,200 unread emails — led to a $2,000 walnut slab becoming firewood, and the systems overhaul that followed.
Eric: ...so wait, back up. You cut the walnut. You had already made the cut.
Marta Kowalski: We had already made the cut. My guy Danny is standing there with the router in his hand, and I'm on the phone with the bank, and they're telling me the check came back three days ago.
Eric: Three days ago.
Marta Kowalski: Three. Days. Ago.
Eric: Oof.
Marta Kowalski: And walnut slab, the piece we used, that was a two thousand dollar piece of wood before we touched it. After Danny's cut it's firewood, basically. It's a very expensive cutting board now.
Eric: And you found out because... what, you were just doing the books that night?
Marta Kowalski: I was doing deposits on a Sunday like I always do, and I'm scrolling the Gmail, and I see the notice from the bank buried under like forty other emails, half of which my brother had already deleted from his phone because he thought they were spam.
Eric: Okay. Okay. So for people listening, tell them what Northline actually is, because I think the shape of the business matters here.
Marta Kowalski: Yeah. So Northline Cabinetry, we're in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Custom cabinets, custom built-ins, the occasional big kitchen remodel. Six people counting me and my brother Marcus. We've been at it twelve years this fall.
Eric: Twelve years. That's not a startup problem, that's a...
Marta Kowalski: That's a "we should know better" problem, is what it is.
Eric: I wasn't gonna say it.
Marta Kowalski: You can say it. I say it.
Eric: So how were you tracking jobs before the walnut incident?
Marta Kowalski: Spiral notebook. One notebook. It sits on the corner of my desk. I write the client name, the deposit amount, the date, whether the countertop template is done. And then the Gmail inbox, which is shared, meaning me, Marcus, and our office person Steph all log into the same account.
Eric: All three of you, same login.
Marta Kowalski: Same login. And Marcus deletes stuff. Steph archives stuff. I star stuff. It's chaos, it's just... it's chaos with a system, I guess.
Eric: Chaos with a system. I love that.
Marta Kowalski: It worked for eight years. Then it stopped working.
Eric: Okay so let me play back what I'm hearing, because I want to name the actual problem before we get into what you did about it. It's not really the notebook, right? The notebook is fine for six people. The problem is you've got money moving in one system, the bank, work getting ordered in another system, your suppliers, and communication happening in a third system, Gmail. And nothing talks to each other.
Marta Kowalski: Nothing talks. Nothing talks.
Eric: So the deposit clears, or doesn't clear, and there's no signal that reaches Danny before he picks up the router.
Marta Kowalski: Right. Danny works off the shop schedule my brother writes on the whiteboard on Monday morning. Whiteboard doesn't know about the bank.
Eric: Whiteboard doesn't know about the bank. That should be a t-shirt.
Marta Kowalski: Please make it.
Eric: Okay, so how'd you find me? Because you didn't call me, someone sent you my way.
Marta Kowalski: My accountant. She's the one who, after the walnut thing, she sat me down and said Marta, you need to stop running a two-million-dollar business out of a notebook.
Eric: Bless her.
Marta Kowalski: Bless her. And she said there's a guy who does this kind of consulting, small shops, blue collar mostly, and he'll actually set the thing up, not just tell you to go set it up.
Eric: Which is the whole trick. Because most people, if I just tell them "go get software," they go get software, they open it, they close it, and it sits there.
Marta Kowalski: It sits there. Yep.
Eric: Alright so tell them what we did. Or, actually, let me tell them what I saw when I first came in, and you tell me if I'm remembering it right.
Marta Kowalski: Go.
Eric: You had, I think, four kitchens in progress. You had somewhere between eight and ten deposits sitting in various states of "did it clear, didn't it clear, is it a check, is it a wire." You had a Gmail with I want to say eleven thousand unread.
Marta Kowalski: Eleven thousand two hundred and something. Yeah.
Eric: And the notebook. Which honestly, the notebook was the most organized thing you had.
Marta Kowalski: The notebook was the crown jewel.
Eric: So the first thing, and I want listeners to hear this because it's counterintuitive, the first thing I did was NOT rip the notebook away from you.
Marta Kowalski: No.
Eric: Because if I take the notebook, you have nothing. You're flying blind for a week while we set up new tools. That's when jobs get dropped.
Marta Kowalski: That's when the next walnut gets cut.
Eric: Exactly. So we kept the notebook for the first three weeks. What we did instead, we set up two things in parallel. One was a workspace in Notion, just for you and Marcus and Steph, where every active job got its own page. Client, address, deposit status, materials ordered, template date, install date. Just the page. Not fancy.
Marta Kowalski: And you made me fill it out for the current jobs, sitting there, in the office, with you.
Eric: I made you fill it out with me watching, yes, because I know how this goes. If I email you the template you'll do it in six months.
Marta Kowalski: I would not have done it in six months.
Eric: I know you wouldn't have. So that's piece one, Notion, that's the workspace, that's the shared brain. Piece two is the platform we use, which is, and I'll just call it this, the all-in-one ops platform we run our agency on. That's the piece that actually did the heavy lifting.
Marta Kowalski: What does that mean, heavy lifting. Explain that for me the way you explained it to me the first day.
Eric: Sure. So the platform, the way I use it with shops like yours, it's the thing that sits between the client and everything else. When somebody fills out the "get a quote" form on your website, it goes into the platform. When they sign the estimate, it goes through the platform. When they pay the deposit, the deposit goes through the platform, so you get a notification the second it clears OR the second it bounces.
Marta Kowalski: The second it bounces.
Eric: The second it bounces. And more importantly, the job card in Notion, that we set up, it flips a status. Deposit cleared, green. Deposit pending, yellow. Deposit failed, red.
Marta Kowalski: And Marcus can see it. On his phone. Standing in the shop.
Eric: Marcus can see it standing in the shop. Danny can see it before he picks up the router.
Marta Kowalski: That's the whole thing. That is the whole thing right there.
Eric: That is the whole thing. Everything else we built is bells and whistles. The bells and whistles are nice, we can talk about them, but the core is: money status is visible to the person about to spend the material.
Marta Kowalski: Talk about the text messages, because that was the part I fought you on.
Eric: You fought me hard.
Marta Kowalski: I fought you hard. Because I thought it was going to feel like spam to my clients. These are people spending forty, sixty grand on a kitchen. I didn't want them getting robo-texts from Northline.
Eric: Right. And what I told you was, we're not sending marketing. We're sending logistics. There's a difference.
Marta Kowalski: There's a big difference, it turns out.
Eric: So the platform sends the text, but the text is: "Hi Jennifer, this is Marta at Northline. Your deposit cleared, we're ordering your slab Monday. Reply here if anything changes." That's not spam. That's just... doing your job in writing.
Marta Kowalski: And they LOVE it. That's what surprised me. Like, Jennifer texted back a heart emoji.
Eric: The heart emoji is the highest praise.
Marta Kowalski: The heart emoji is the highest praise in the remodeling business, I'm telling you.
Eric: Okay. So we've got the workspace, we've got the platform, we've got the deposit flow, we've got the client texts. What was the moment for you, though? Because there's always a moment where somebody goes from "I'm doing this because Eric said to" to "oh, I get it now."
Marta Kowalski: The moment was... okay, it was about six weeks in. I was at my kid's soccer game on a Saturday morning. Phone buzzes. It's a notification from the platform saying a new lead came in from the website, they'd filled out the quote form, and the platform had already sent them the intake questionnaire and booked them a slot on my calendar for Tuesday.
Eric: While you were at the game.
Marta Kowalski: While I was watching my seven-year-old play defense, which she is not good at, by the way.
Eric: Sorry, Marta.
Marta Kowalski: She'll get there. But yeah, that was the moment. Because a year ago that lead would have sat in the Gmail till Sunday night when I did deposits, and by Sunday night they'd already called two other cabinet shops.
Eric: They'd already called two other cabinet shops. That's the part nobody talks about, right? It's not just "the lead came in faster." It's "you were the first one to respond, so you got the job."
Marta Kowalski: I got the job. That's a Tuesday appointment that turned into a real kitchen.
Eric: Okay so let's do the honest part. What broke? Because it wasn't all clean.
Marta Kowalski: Oh, good. Yes. Let's do the honest part.
Eric: Something always breaks in the first sixty days.
Marta Kowalski: Marcus.
Eric: Marcus broke.
Marta Kowalski: Marcus broke. My brother, he's older than me, he does not love new software. And for the first month he kept updating jobs in the notebook and not in Notion. So we had two sets of books, basically, and they didn't match.
Eric: Which is worse than one messy set of books.
Marta Kowalski: Way worse. Because now you don't know which one is right.
Eric: How'd you fix it?
Marta Kowalski: I took the notebook.
Eric: You just took it.
Marta Kowalski: I took it. I put it in a drawer. I said Marcus, the notebook is dead, may it rest in peace, if you need to write something down there are Post-it notes and then you put it in Notion at the end of the day.
Eric: And did that work?
Marta Kowalski: It worked in about four days. Because the Post-it notes started falling off his truck dashboard and he got tired of losing them.
Eric: The market decided.
Marta Kowalski: The market decided. Yeah.
Eric: Okay, results. And I want to be careful here, I'm not going to have you throw out revenue numbers, that's not the point of this show. But directionally, six months in, what's different.
Marta Kowalski: Directionally. Um. We have not cut into a piece of material for a client whose money hadn't cleared. Not once.
Eric: That's the big one.
Marta Kowalski: That's the big one. Second one, my Sunday nights. I used to spend four, five hours on Sunday doing deposits and chasing emails. Now it's about forty minutes and it's mostly just reviewing what the system already did.
Eric: Which is time back with your family.
Marta Kowalski: Which is time back with my kid. Yeah.
Eric: And the lead response thing?
Marta Kowalski: We're closing more of the leads that come in cold, because we're getting to them same day instead of same week. I'm not going to give you a number because I don't want to overclaim, but it's meaningfully more.
Eric: Meaningfully more. I'll take it.
Marta Kowalski: I know you will.
Eric: Okay. So for the person listening. Small shop owner, blue collar business, maybe they've got their own notebook, their own shared Gmail, their own version of the walnut moment coming up. What's the ONE thing to try this week. Not the whole overhaul. One thing.
Marta Kowalski: One thing.
Eric: One thing.
Marta Kowalski: Make a list of every job in progress. Just once. Sit down, one sitting, write down every active client, how much they've paid, and whether that payment has actually cleared the bank. Not "they said they sent it." Cleared. In your account. That list will terrify you and it will also save you.
Eric: That is a GREAT one thing. And I'll add the platform version of it. If you're gonna get one piece of software this month, make it the thing that tells you when money moves. Not your CRM, not your project tool, not the fancy scheduler. The money notification. Because that's the one that stops the walnut from getting cut.
Marta Kowalski: The walnut. My god, the walnut.
Eric: RIP the walnut.
Marta Kowalski: RIP.
Eric: Marta, thank you. Seriously. It takes guts to come on here and tell the bounced-check story.
Marta Kowalski: It's a good story now. It was not a good story in April.
Eric: It's a good story now.
Marta Kowalski: Thanks for having me, Eric.
Eric: Hey, if you're listening and this one hit close to home, do me a favor, hit subscribe so the next one finds you. We'll see you next week.
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