How Kayla Went From Busy-But-Scattered to Running a Business She Can Actually See

How a custom Asana build gave her visibility into clients, prospects, and workload without overcomplicating anything.

The Client & Situation

Kayla is a principal consultant at Bridgepoint Evaluation, a nonprofit program evaluation consultancy focused on food systems and food hubs. The work is specialized and meaningful. The backend wasn’t keeping up.

She was busy - genuinely busy. But busyness and clarity aren’t the same thing. Information lived in too many places. Half-built systems had piled up over time, each one created to solve a specific problem and left somewhere in the pile. There was no single place to go to understand what was actually happening in the business - which projects were active, which proposals were in progress, what still needed to happen before the week was out.

She’d see other consultants using Asana and had ideas about how it could work for her. She just didn’t know how to make it work for her.

The Goal

Kayla needed a system that was simple enough to actually use - not one that would require its own maintenance. The build needed to:

• Create a central place to track active client projects and prospect proposals at a glance

• Provide clear visibility into workload, project status, and open tasks

• Make it easy to see what could be handed off to team members and subcontractors

• Start simple and be built to grow

The through-line: it had to make sense for her - not be a one-size-fits-all setup pulled from someone else’s playbook.

The Strategy

The first decision was to build a foundation, not a finished product.

Kayla already had a starting point - a main Asana project for the business using board view, where each section represented a leg of the business, and each task represented an active client or project. We worked with that structure and made it usable.

To keep things on the free plan as long as possible, we used tags for project types, task statuses, and task types - so the right information was visible at a glance without needing paid features. We also built out a template task for proposals and projects: duplicatable cards with a built-in subtask list, so nothing had to be rebuilt from scratch each time something new came in.

We also set up a Marketing & Communications hub - a dedicated space to manage content workflow and turn a loosely help content plan into something with actual structure and a visible calendar. Curious what a content system built inside Asana actually looks like in practice? This Content Management case study shows exactly that.

About six months in, the system had grown enough for automation to make sense. We upgraded to the Starter plan and added rules and custom fields to projects where tasks were becoming repetitive.

The upgrade didn’t change the structure - it just made the structure do more of the work automatically.

The Results

Tangible Results

• One place to track every active client and prospect - no more hunting across half-finished systems

• New projects get set up consistently every time, without manual rebuilding from scratch

• Automated subtasks and due dates mean fewer falls through the cracks as work moves forward

Operational Impact

• No more guesswork - every potential opportunity enters one place that guides the week from there

• It’s clear what can be handed off - and to whom

• The business no longer runs in her head. The way she thinks about business development and project implementation is now built into the system itself

It lifted the mental load, gave me a framework to follow, and created consistent operations.

- Kayla, Bridgepoint Evaluations

The main quest is handled. The rest is just deciding what to build next.

Ready to stop running your business in your head? Let's talk about what we could build together!