Why I’m building Olio.

In 2024, I started GCC5 — a small agency built around strategy and craft. The work showed up fast. So did the clients. What I didn’t have was a system to run any of it.

Like every agency owner I know, I went tool shopping.

A website on Squarespace. A CRM on HubSpot. Bookings on Calendly. Newsletters on Mailchimp. Project management in Notion. Social scheduling on Buffer. A second booking page on Cal.com because the first one looked nothing like my brand. By month three I was paying for nine subscriptions and none of them knew the others existed.

I’d send a new lead through three platforms before they ever got on a call. I’d duplicate every project across four tools. I’d lose entire weekends stitching it all together. I was running a small agency with the operational debt of a Series A startup — and none of the headcount.

The worst part? Every tool I tried was built for someone else. CRMs designed for sales teams chasing 100,000 SQLs a quarter. Booking flows designed for barbershops. Site builders designed for freelancers selling templates. None of them were designed for the kind of work I sell — strategy, taste, judgment, the things that don’t fit on a feature comparison table.

I kept waiting for someone to build the obvious thing: one tool that does the job of all of them, designed for people who run small agencies and consultancies. Nobody built it.

So I’m building it.

Olio is the platform I needed two years ago. It’s the platform I’ll use for GCC5 starting day one. Everything I learned the hard way — the missed leads, the broken handoffs, the calendar that looked nothing like the brand — went into the design.

If you’re reading this and any of it sounds familiar, it’s probably the platform you needed too.

Get on the waitlist. I’ll send one email when it’s ready.