For four Christmas seasons, I ran this founder-operated holiday lighting company. It grossed more than $100,000, provided jobs for five people each season in the local community, and became a real operating system: website buildout, pricing proposals, satellite-based measurements, marketing, scheduling, and client storage.
Customized Christmas Lights served residential and commercial customers across North Metro Atlanta, Georgia. I owned the sales-and-operations loop end to end: attracting leads online, measuring homes, sending proposals, coordinating installs and uninstalls, and organizing stored client inventory for the next season.
Founder / Engineer / Owner / Manager
4 Christmas seasons · $100K+ gross revenue · Provided jobs to 5 people each season
Hanging lights was only the visible part. Around it, I built the customer-acquisition and fulfillment system: the website, quote flow, proposal process, measuring workflow, marketing presence, and crew coordination all had to reinforce one another.
1. Pricing proposals and quote intake
2. Confirming jobs and coordinating install schedules
3. Seasonal installation execution
4. January uninstall scheduling
5. Storage and repeat-client setup for the following year
This company sharpened the instincts I still use in software: build trust quickly, remove friction from the customer path, price work clearly, and keep operations tight enough that the back office never becomes the bottleneck. The surface was Christmas lighting, not apps. The underlying work was product, systems, and execution.
