Braden
Schmid

Luxury automotive — marketing, sales ops & internal tooling

I came in as a sales rep and started noticing problems everywhere. Broken processes, bad data, tools that didn't do what the team actually needed. I figured out pretty quickly that I could fix most of it myself, so I taught myself how Salesforce works underneath, learned the architecture, and brought in the right specialists for the parts I couldn't build alone. Now I run marketing, sales ops, and internal tooling. Most of what happens between someone seeing an ad and a rep closing a six-figure sale runs on systems I built or manage.

• Salesforce rebuild. Restructured the whole org from the ground up. Custom objects, lead routing automation, rep-specific workflow views, and an internal follow-up hub the sales team uses every day.
• CallForge. A custom predictive auto dialer on Twilio and Salesforce. Priority queues, voicemail beep detection with auto-drop, hot lead reallocation, full call logging. No off-the-shelf dialer did what I needed, so I built one that did.
• Paid acquisition and analytics. Meta and Google ads at scale, UTM and attribution tracking, Looker dashboards, CallRail, landing page work. If a lead touches something, I want it tracked.

Roofing — sales representative

Sold roofing in the insurance restoration space. Instead of working leads the way everyone else did, I built my own process. I pulled homeowner names from public property records to personalize the outreach, which gave me a real edge. I was the top rep for several months straight.

Waterline — founder

My own business on Lake Lanier doing dock cleaning and spider treatments. I built the rig myself: a pontoon with a custom metal holder for two reels and two pressure washers, set up so we could clean two docks a day and handle spider treatments on the smaller ones. Building the whole thing from nothing, the equipment, the operation, and the customers, taught me more than anything else on this list. I still think it's a good idea, and I want to come back to it.

Landscaping

Where it started. About a year and a half through high school. It's not glamorous work, but it's where I first saw how a business actually runs day to day, and where I learned to sell.