Stage Sound Services supplies the sound, video, lighting, and staging behind West End productions, touring shows across the UK, and events as far away as Germany and the Far East. From its base in Cardiff, a team of more than 100 keeps it all moving: a warehouse crew that preps and tests every piece of kit, an office team building quotes, finance, technical support, and a logistics team running 16 vans and trucks around the country.

Almost all of it starts with an email to the hires address. Back in 2019, that address was a Google Groups distribution list that copied every inquiry to five or six people at once.

“The email gets delivered to multiple people, then you can’t see who’s replied,” says Ian Thorpe, who runs IT at Stage Sound Services. Unless someone remembered to reply all, the rest of the team had no idea a quote had already gone out. “So someone else makes a quote for the same client with a completely different number. And the client phones up and says, I’ll go with the cheaper one, please.”

After a few rounds of that, the office team went hunting for something better. They cycled through Spark, Front, Zendesk, and a couple of other tools Ian can no longer name. “Every couple of months we would change it, just because there was always something wrong.” Then, at the end of 2019, a lucky Google search brought them to Missive, a collaborative email client built for teams, and the tool hopping stopped.

A slow, consistent rollout

Missive stuck where the others hadn’t, and Ian doesn’t dress up why. “I’m not really sure what the others were missing that suddenly we found with Missive. It just seemed to work.” For the first time, the five or six people handling quotes shared one view of every inquiry: who had replied, who was on it, what was still waiting.

Then spring 2020 arrived and live events went quiet. When productions returned in late 2021, the office team came back with a request: it would be good if finance was in Missive too, so the same invoice never went out twice. That request became a pattern that ran for years. Logistics next, since they coordinate delivery times with the same customers. Then technical support. Then the warehouse managers.

Each addition went through the boss, a few seats at a time, and at first he was a hard sell. “Initially there was real pushback about paying for an email client when everyone is used to email being free,” Ian says. So it started with as few users as possible. Adding the finance team was a real battle. So was logistics.

“You go to the boss and whisper in his ear, and maybe we can add a couple of people. A couple of months later you whisper in his ear again, and we add a couple more.”

What kept the door open was that the boss was in Missive himself almost from the start, because he still quotes the biggest customers personally. He’d felt the value before he had to approve the cost, and the value kept compounding. By the time the warehouse managers went in last year, the battle was over. “It was seen as a no brainer.” Not long ago Ian found himself in a conversation about whether there was anyone else they should add, with no hesitancy about the extra cost at all. Today about 40 of the 120 staff work in Missive, spread across every department that touches a customer.

Tagging instead of forwarding

What sold each new team was the same mechanic every time. Before Missive, pulling another department into a client conversation meant forwarding the thread and rewriting the backstory. “I have to write it all out into an email,” as Ian puts it, then worry about whether the client or the other team replies to whom. With internal comments, an account manager just @mentions finance or logistics on the conversation itself. The full history is right there, and the client never sees the internal back and forth.

Seven years in, the setup has real structure: 73 company-wide rules, most of them applying shared labels that pull the right people into conversations they would otherwise never see. Autoresponders confirm every inquiry to the tech support address, with a phone number for anything urgent.

An offboarding handover, written by AI

The newest layer is AI. About a month before we spoke, a long-tenured team member was leaving, the kind of person who kept a label for every country and every theatre production he handled. Ian turned on Gemini in Missive, and the departing employee used it to summarize the conversations under each label, one handover document per label, for the person taking over. “He said he’d save so much time doing that.”

Support that has already fixed it

Ian manages other software too, including a US-based rental management system, and the support contrast is what he keeps coming back to. “If I email them when we open for the day, they won’t even have read it by now. I’m not going to get a reply today. It’s going to be a couple of days.” With Missive: “I get a reply the same day. And the reply is, oh yes, we’ve already fixed that. We’ve patched it for you already.”

“Yeah, it works”

Seven years on, Missive has gone from the tool that ended the cycling to something nobody thinks about. “We’ve been using it so long that it’s just become a habit.” Before our call, Ian asked around the office for complaints to pass along. He came back nearly empty handed. “Everyone was just like, yeah, it works. That’s what we need.”

There’s still a list. Ian was reading up on adding WhatsApp Business to Missive the day before we spoke, and found a step-by-step guide waiting in the docs. For an email client handling the quotes, invoices, deliveries, and support requests of a 120-person operation, being reliable and boring in the background is the highest compliment there is.