How Not Therapy Coaching Automated Their HubSpot Pipeline

From Flying by the Seat of our Pants to a Sales System That Runs Itself

How Not Therapy Coaching went from a fully manual HubSpot setup to an end-to-end automated sales pipeline that's built to scale.

Not Therapy Coaching is a mentorship and life coaching organization that works with teens and young adults navigating mental health transitions and the challenges of early adult life. Founded by Colin MacDonald and Hayley Caddes, the organization works with clients and their families to build structure, independence, and momentum. They've seen steady growth since launching just over two years ago.

By the time they brought in Dept.1 Solutions for a full HubSpot buildout, Not Therapy had already worked with Dylan across two prior engagements: an impact reporting framework built from scratch, and a documented sales narrative that took a process that lived entirely in the founders' heads and turned it into scripts, collateral, follow-up emails, and an objection bank ready for future sales hires. The HubSpot project was the natural next chapter.

The Problem

Not Therapy had HubSpot. They were using it; deals were being created, forms were embedded on the site, meeting links were live. But nearly everything downstream was manual. When a family submitted an inquiry, someone had to manually send the booking link. After a discovery call, someone had to manually follow up. Tracking engagements between stages was a judgment call with no standard triggers attached to it.

For a two-person founding team managing a growing coaching roster, that meant Colin, who runs all revenue for the organization, was spending significant time on follow-up and pipeline management rather than talking to families and getting support to young people. As Hayley described it: they were flying by the seat of their pants, with nothing really written down, processed, or operationalized.

The ask wasn't just to clean up HubSpot. It was to build a system that could eventually run without them and support a future salesperson from day one.

What We Built

The engagement covered five interconnected workflow areas, each reviewed, pressure-tested, and implemented in sequence.

Lead intake was rebuilt from the form level up, starting with accurate sorting of parent, client, and partner inquiries into the right automated paths, auto-enrolling contacts in the correct sequences, and triggering deal creation logic based on inquiry type. Discovery call handoffs, no-show recovery, and youth call scheduling were all automated with conditional branching. The quote and decision workflow was streamlined with follow-up logic, deadline nudges, and package-type routing. Post-decision onboarding was standardized so the handoff to coaches happened consistently, without manual coordination. Long-term nurture sequences, including a reconnection flow for families who had gone cold, were built and documented. A reporting kit was layered in alongside each workflow area, surfacing the metrics that actually signal whether the pipeline is healthy: conversion rates by stage, no-show rates, quote acceptance by package type, and reactivation results.

Throughout the build, Dept.1 delivered work asynchronously: short video walkthroughs for each workflow, written documentation with embedded questions, and bi-weekly check-ins for anything that couldn't be resolved in the shared doc. The goal was to keep the review burden low and the feedback loop tight.

What Made This One Different

This project was clean. It ran on time, on budget, and had a clear definition of success from day one. A significant reason for that Not Therapy's work prior to kickoff. Before implementation began, they had already documented her and Colin's full vision for the system: what it needed to do, at every stage, in their own words. That meant the discovery phase was largely validation work rather than excavation. We weren't uncovering the requirements; we were pressure-testing them against what HubSpot could actually do.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most implementations stall in the gap between what a team wants and what they can articulate. Not Therapy had closed that gap before we showed up.

The other thing worth naming is how hard we pushed the platform. Not Therapy is on a specific set of HubSpot licenses, and several of the workflows we designed bumped right up against the edge of what those licenses support. For a less experienced implementation partner, some of those moments would have become dead ends, constraints flagged, scope reduced, capabilities left on the table. Instead, we found workarounds that stayed firmly within HubSpot's known capabilities, applied creatively and with proper guardrails in place in case of any future license changes.

The goal was simple: make sure they're getting every dollar of value out of the tools they're already paying for. That's the approach we bring to every system build.

The Outcome

When a family reaches out to Not Therapy now, they typically book a discovery call within 24 hours. It just shows up on Colin's calendar. The sequences that follow use Not Therapy's voice, reflect the right offer tier, and move automatically through the pipeline without anyone managing them manually.

As Hayley put it: the business went from nothing documented or operationalized to having everything automated, documented, and able to run without them for the most part. The system is now built to support a salesperson. That wasn't possible before.