Who we are.

I’m Robert Hargrove, the founder of Modustra IQ. I spent more than 10 years in technical sales, mostly in power electronics, and went through more CRMs than I can count. None of them fit the way this kind of business works. Companies like ours don’t just sell standard products. We also sell customization, engineering services, and fully custom builds. Every CRM I tried let me down the same way: it didn’t match how the job gets done, so updating it always felt like an extra step, or like doing the work twice.

It didn’t work the other way around either. Even if I put everything into the CRM first, I couldn’t get out of it what I needed to show how our products were priced. Deal stages built for consulting firms, media companies, or SaaS just didn’t fit custom manufacturing.

The real work happened in Excel: homemade margin calculators, hand-built quotes, BOM lists, price sheets, and templates. I’d often have several screens open just to put one quote together, copying and pasting between documents and hoping I hadn’t made a mistake. The same questions kept coming up:

• Did you remember to convert the currency?
• Did you discount from the right line?
• Did you pull the correct product price from the margin calculator?

Eventually, after one more CRM that didn’t work out, I thought: what if I built my own? I have a background in computer science and physics, so there was no good reason not to try. So I jumped in.

I started by building tools for my own sales job, integrated with our ERP. First, a dashboard to see where things stood. Then quoting tools, customer management, lead management, and more. I spent my nights and weekends on one problem: quoting for custom manufacturing.

Now we’re turning it into a product: a full CRM with light ERP built in, meant to replace the spreadsheets and the systems that never quite fit. It handles quoting, order entry, invoicing, returns, credits, and more, and it connects to QuickBooks. Most of all, its tools follow the way manufacturing really works, custom and standard alike.

Revision control, drawing control, document control, BOMs, labour: Modustra IQ keeps track of all of it. From BOM import to STEP file viewing, it’s built for one group of people:

People who make things.

Robert Hargrove, Founder, Modustra IQ · LinkedIn