Hardin Insurance: a five-week cutover with zero disruption.
We modernized twenty years of records and moved 32,000+ documents while daily work continued. Then we measured what changed.
Twenty years of records. Zero disruption.
The cutover completed in five weeks while the business kept moving.
- 2.3×
- people reached in a month
- 10 min
- web lead to CRM, nobody typing
- 32,000+
- documents moved
- Zero
- disruption
Hardin Insurance ran its clients, policies, leads, and call history in a Microsoft Access system the owner had used since 1992, in its current form since about 2005. Every record moved into a modern, secure cloud database and was verified, while the team kept the same screens and habits.
The team ran and experimented with the new system for a week before the hard transfer. Then the foundation kept paying: 32,000+ client documents moved into SharePoint, one click from the client record, and texting and email now run from the agency’s own accounts.
What changed after the cutover.
Measured from the agency’s own system, September 2026. Before-and-after comparisons, stated as “after,” not “because of.”
- Reach
- Over thirty days this August and September, the office reached 2.3 times as many people as in the thirty days before the project began, and sent 3.5 times as many messages. Phone calls stayed flat: the gain is messaging that was not practical before.
- Lead intake
- Web leads now land in the CRM within ten minutes, with nobody typing. In August, six in ten new client and prospect records arrived that way.
- Rate shopping
- Policies are quoted against the market ahead of their anniversary, with no one logging into a quoting site: 18,915 quotes across 66 carriers in the first month, and twice as many policies moved to better-priced plans as in the same months last year.
- Support
- 58 requests filed from inside the application, all resolved, more than half within a day.
In the owner’s words.
I ran my agency on Microsoft Access starting in 1992. It was a great system when I picked it up, and it evolved with me for a long time, but by today’s standards it had become a real limitation — and finding anyone willing or able to work on it had gotten nearly impossible.
There are plenty of software subscriptions built for my industry, and I never wanted any of them. The catch is always the same: you have to use their email service and their phone service. My clients would start getting messages from an address and a number that aren’t mine. Bret solved that. He integrated my own business email account and my own business phone number directly into my texting and messaging, so everything my clients receive comes from me — not from random addresses and random numbers they don’t recognize.
The difference in my day-to-day is not subtle. Getting to my client information is fast and simple now, the friction is gone, and I’m reaching about 300% more people on a regular basis — and that number is still growing. Not only did my business not slow down through this, it has increased consistently since I made the switch.
To any business owner who’s nervous about touching a system their business depends on: that was me. What made it work was that Bret moved the data over and got me comfortable with the new version before we committed to anything. We ran it and experimented for a week, then made the hard transfer. We never skipped a beat.