Solaris Management Group
Construction
7 People
4 Days
per team member, per day, by replacing tool-hopping with a single source of truth.
Now confidently scaling beyond the previous ceiling of 1–2 simultaneous projects.
Manual daily logs replaced with a mobile form sub-contractors actually want to use.
Solaris Management Group is a construction management firm that operates as a consultant for homeowners associations, embedded inside the HOA team rather than acting as an outside contractor. With a small team running multiple high-value sites, Hollybrook Golf & Tennis and Ocean Colony among them, Jonny Jeune had ambitious plans to grow the business. But the operational reality was working against him.
The day-to-day was running on a patchwork of disconnected tools:
The symptoms were exactly what you would expect from a fragmented stack:
Daily logs alone were eating roughly 40 minutes a day of Jonny’s time. Homeowner issues lived only in an email-based “issues log,” vulnerable to being buried in someone’s inbox. And every team member was bouncing between platforms and notebooks just to figure out the status of basic work.
The deeper risk was strategic. As Jonny put it:
Our biggest risk with sticking to the old way of doing things is that we would have critical tasks that would simply not get done. Team members would feel frustrated because the many tasks were not organized in one single place.
The ceiling was visible. To scale to 3–4 simultaneous projects, the operating system had to change.
Over two working sessions and a focused build phase, Solaris went from fragmented tools to a single operating system: Solaris Management Hub.
The architecture is built around 11 interconnected databases that mirror how the business actually runs:
Project execution
Stakeholders & operations
Knowledge & finance
The experience layer
The build was deliberately collaborative, not a black-box delivery. Jonny and I reviewed database properties together using Notion comments, choosing what to keep, remove, and add before a single relation was wired up.
The client’s verdict on the experience:
Working with David continues to be a great experience. I work with several other software platforms, and the difference with David's approach in working with his client is to be available to provide quick solutions. My business is a need-to-get-things-done-now type of business. That means our clients can not wait for several days before getting answers to issues. We deal with un-expectancies on a daily basis. David provides the right, exact solutions to address the critical issues, quickly.
The Solaris Management Hub has been running long enough for the effects to show up in three places: the hours in the day, the ceiling on the business, and the way the team feels about its own work.
The first thing to disappear was the tool-hopping, the constant switching between spreadsheets, notebooks, reporting software, and email just to establish what was happening on site.
I believe each team member saves between 2 to 3 hours when we use the Notion platform to streamline all our company info. No more jumping from several different platforms and notebooks.
Across a small team, that’s the equivalent of unlocking a part-time hire’s worth of capacity, every single day, without adding a single person to payroll.
Much of that time came from one place: the daily log. Pushing it out to a mobile form meant the people closest to the work could report it themselves, and the previous platform’s friction stopped being Jonny’s problem to absorb.
Our sub-contractors are finding this form pretty easy to use. We were forcing contractors and associates to use another platform that had too many steps and was just frustrating to do each day.
What used to be 40 minutes of manual entry for Jonny is now seconds of self-reporting from a phone in the field and the paper sign-ins at the gate are gone entirely.
Time saved matters, but the strategic result is bigger. The old stack physically limited how much work Solaris could take on, because organizing a third or fourth project simply wasn’t possible by hand.
With Notion, I feel very confident in scaling up. I was only able to do 1–2 projects at a time because there was no way I could organize more work using my old systems. Because I now have Notion, I can manage several projects.
The constraint on growth was never demand or expertise. It was operational capacity and that’s the part the system removed.
None of it would have mattered if the team had quietly gone back to their notebooks. Designing for the simplest possible experience is what made the rollout stick.
Because Notion is easy to use, there was no resistance whatsoever.
That frictionless adoption is what turns a system into a habit, and a habit into a standard the HOA clients can see.
Asked to summarize the change in his team’s performance, Jonny needed four words:
The improvement to our team's performance can be summed up in 4 words: Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency and Accountability!
Are you running a construction management or HOA consulting business on a patchwork of tools?
If you’re spending hours every day on tasks a connected system could absorb, let’s talk.
Construction Management companies will find this Notion setup as a game-changer. Serious teams that are on the move to growing will need to have software that corresponds to their direction.
You open your laptop and the tabs are already waiting. Project tracker in one. Budget in a spreadsheet, schedule in another. Slack for the team, WhatsApp for the subs, email for the client who uses neither. Nobody agrees which one is the source of truth.
You can build stuff, but you don’t really understand what you’re building, why is this a page and that a database, what exactly is a block, and how do they fit together?
No pitch deck. No obligation. 30 minutes to understand your business and tell you honestly what I think, including if I’m not the right fit.
Built for the businesses that build everything else.
No product pitches. No padding. One weekly read for serious operators.