Context
Barnes Yachting sits inside Barnes International, a global luxury property brand. Their clients expect the digital experience to match the offline one, which in luxury means discretion, speed, and never being asked for the same information twice.
The problem
The business ran on disconnected parts. Brokers tracked listings and clients in their own way, leadership had no live view of the pipeline, and client communication was scattered across whatever channel it started in. Every handover between website, broker, and back office was a manual re-entry, and each one was a chance to lose something.
What I decided
I split the system into six components rather than building one platform: website, data room, broker portal, client portal, CRM, and CEO dashboard. That decision cost more up front in interface design. It bought the ability to change one part without touching the others, which matters when a business is still working out how it wants to operate.
The CRM became the centre, not the website. Leads, inbox activity, bookings, and broker actions all resolve into one record. Getting that right was the difference between a set of tools and an actual system.
The automation layer was deliberately narrow: lead capture and sync, yacht data propagating to every surface that displays it, brochure generation with engagement tracking, and Outlook-driven email and task handling. Everything else stayed manual on purpose. In a business where a single client relationship is worth a great deal, automating a judgement call is a bad trade.
The honest trade-off is the CRM itself. Building it in Bubble alongside everything else is what made a six-part system deliverable at all, and it gave brokers a workflow with almost no friction in it. It also has a ceiling. As the business has grown, the CRM is the component most likely to move to a dedicated platform, and that conversation is live.
I do not think that makes it the wrong decision. A custom CRM they could not afford, eighteen months later, would have been worse than a working one they eventually outgrow. But a client should hear that from me at the start rather than discover it in year two, which is why it is written here.
What shipped
A public site with immersive listings feeding straight into the CRM. A data room holding yacht, client, and document records with instant brochure generation. A broker workspace for listings, leads, and client activity. A client portal with secure document and booking access. A CEO dashboard covering sales, fleet, and broker performance. A marketing room tying campaigns to shared KPIs.
The result
Manual process reduced by around 60%, and yacht, client, and document data centralised in one place. Leadership went from asking for a pipeline update to reading one. For clients, the path from website enquiry to secure portal became continuous rather than a series of handoffs.