Norm was drowning in emails. A former solopreneur turned founder of a growing real estate consulting firm (Wonoak), he went from watching YouTube during COVID to managing properties coast-to-coast and closing deals for billion-dollar banks. That’s when he realized, his inbox wasn’t built for scale.

The business: Real estate, but make it nationwide

Norm leads a tight-knit team of 5 (or 6 depends who’s counting) managing commercial and residential real estate across the U.S. Their business spans:‍

• ‍Brokerage work for large, multi-location clients (think: regional banks)‍
• Property management that ranges from fixing fridges in single-family homes to coordinating facilities in office buildings‍
• Consulting when clients need expert hands on more strategic work

Their bread and butter? High-stakes deals and lots, and lots, of communication.

The breaking point: When your inbox becomes a firehose

Norm’s workflow worked… until it didn’t.

He was using Superhuman. His partner was bringing in Slack, Notion, ClickUp… all the productivity hits. But real estate doesn’t run like a product roadmap. It’s reactive chaos. They needed something that could keep up.

As the business scaled, so did the volume of incoming communication—from vendors, landlords, clients, teammates, and contractors. One email could turn into 30. And Norm was still the center of it all.

Looking for: A platform that could keep pace

Enter the shortlist: Front vs. Missive.

Norm and his engineer-partner trialed both tools side-by-side. Their must-haves?

• Shared inboxes for email, text, and phone (they ended up with Dialpad)
• Seamless setup (spoiler: Norm didn’t want to code)
• Collaboration that felt natural, even for non-tech teammates
• Visibility across the team to keep everyone in sync, without Norm being the middleman

“Front was good. Missive just felt easier. We got set up same day. Everyone understood it. And I stopped being the help desk.”

The transition: Letting go (Of control, not quality)

With Missive, the team started rerouting communication away from Norm and into shared inboxes. Everyone gained visibility, context, and the ability to triage fast. Bonus: Missive’s draft collaboration let team members prep replies, and Norm could hit send when ready, no more back-and-forth or forwarding madness.

They now integrate:

• Dialpad for business calls and texting‍
• ClickUp for long-running projects
• HubSpot for CRM

Unexpected wins: The little things that added up

• ‍Shared drafts: “Huge. Saves me hours.”‍
• Programmable shortcuts: “You got me off Superhuman. I didn’t think that was possible.”‍
• Centralization: “One channel, one time. That’s all I ask.”‍
• Guest access: Still a work in progress, but promising for long, landlord-threaded collaborations

Life now: “I’m not the first line of defense anymore”

While the team’s still rolling out new processes and retraining clients to use shared emails and numbers, things are already smoother.

Norm’s big goal? Scale his business without becoming a bottleneck again. With Missive, he’s not just staying afloat, he’s building a team that works together, not through him.

When asked what sealed the deal?

“Honestly, Missive just made sense. The setup didn’t require a 40-page onboarding doc. And for a non-tech firm trying to scale fast, that’s everything.”