Athena Gaia is more than just an online jewelry store, it’s also a livelihood and day-to-day passion. The business grew from a desire to preserve and promote one of Earth’s longest surviving manufacturing traditions, the Greek jewelry industry. Greeks have been making jewelry for over 5,000 years in tiny workshops scattered mostly across Athens, and to this day the best work is still produced by tiny family businesses with intense pride in their craftsmanship. With such small (and often-times antiquated) business partners it has become increasingly difficult to keep the growing stream of orders organized and coherent, so they turned to PowerApps911 for help.

"As we’ve grown, communicating with suppliers and customers has chewed up more and more of our time (to a point where it began interfering with other tasks and personal life) so something needed to be done. Specifically, we wanted to automate such things as relaying orders to designers and e-mailing updates to customers so that we could focus more of our time on building the business. The alternative was to hire additional administrative staff – which wasn’t out of the question but seemed like an inefficiency trap to us." - Pete, Athena Gaia

"We came to PowerApps911 with a general understanding of our information 
needs before we got started. We understood the nature of our problems and had an initial goal in mind. Because we’re ex-IT professionals our biggest asset may have been our ability to trust Quentin’s expertise. Knowing that we had the right person to help us, our strategy was pretty simple: Open the doors as wide as possible and show Quentin everything we thought to be relevant … tell him what our goals were, and then let him do his job. The initial task of automating order information from Shopify (our web host) to our designers was solved in the first 10 hours. The process of managing and incorporating our inventory into the workflow was done quickly thereafter." - Pete, Athena Gaia

1. Customers’ orders are now being relayed to our designers with minimal administrative interference.  

2. Athenia Gaia has sped up order fulfillment and saved money by incorporating their inventory into the order-flow automation. 

3. ​They have saved over $50,000 per year in administrative costs.

4. "We now have a highly skilled “friend” in Quentin who is familiar with our business and looks for additional ways for us to save money and increase productivity." - Pete, Athena Gaia

"Don’t think of your PowerApps consultant as a one-project “hit man”, instead; think of them as your company’s “Digital Coach.”

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Don’t worry about the 10-hour initial “contract”, even if it’s 20 or 30 hours you’re going to save yourself huge amounts of money and make your work life easier. Devote an hour or two per week initially just to letting them understand how your organization works. Allow them to ask questions you’ve never asked yourself, allow them to see things from a digital perspective and open yourself to “change.”

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I can attest that the happiest & most enthusiastic IT professionals are Office 365 / SharePoint people, this can be witnessed by Shane’s constant stream of free instructional videos on YouTube. The rest of PowerApps 911 seems to follow his lead so I would trust that they are going to want to help you find value in the tool they love and give you reasons to keep coming back for more."

- Pete, Athena Gaia