Olympic Combat

The handover document listed the stack — Mailchimp, Vercel, Firebase, Google Cloud, Bitbucket, Next.js — and then, under each migration heading, restated what the vendor's own documentation says: export your environment settings, transfer the project, reconfigure domains. Useful if you already know the system. Useless as a description of *this* system.

So the first job was archaeology rather than engineering. Getting the inherited app running locally surfaced what the document had not: a dependency the previous team had installed but never declared in package.json, react-spring animations that fired in a production build and silently did nothing in dev, and two required environment variables — the Mailchimp audience ID and the Google Maps key — that appeared nowhere in the notes.

None of that became the client's problem. Each finding was resolved against the codebase and confirmed in a single consolidated question rather than escalated as a series of blockers, which is the whole difference between a takeover and a stalled takeover.

• Five gated steps. Parent details → phone verification → child age selection → trial slot → confirmation, each step a route in the Next.js App Router with its own validation.
• Phone OTP as the trust gate. Firebase Auth with reCAPTCHA and SMS sign-in, six-digit code — a school selling free trials to parents needs a real contact number, not an email that bounces.
• Age-routed classes. The child’s age decides which class the trial is for, so the slot the parent picks is a slot that fits their kid.
• Calendly as the slot authority. The trial calendar is embedded rather than reimplemented, with event listeners flipping the lead record to booked the moment the parent schedules — one source of truth for availability, no drifting second calendar.
• Provenance on every lead. UTM parameters and device/OS captured onto the record at signup, so the school can tell which campaign produced which trial.
• Mailchimp on signup. Subscription wired into the same step, with the failure case surfaced to the parent as a plain "check your email spelling" rather than a silent drop.

Alongside the funnel sits the public class timetable — what runs, when, for which ages — and a separate admin console for the people who work the leads. That console is a Firebase-authenticated dashboard over the same Firestore collection: a filterable table of leads with CSV export, date-range filtering, and Recharts analytics on top, with Redux holding the table and chart state.

The lead record is the interesting part. It carries not just contact details but the whole follow-up state — contacted, responded to follow-up, completed the trial session, signed up in full, plus a submissions history and free-text comments. The funnel and the console are two views of one object, which is why the sales side could actually be measured.

• Vercel. Environment variables, build settings and domain/SSL configuration carried across, with project ownership reassigned to the client’s account.
• Firebase and Google Cloud. A new project under the client’s own Google Cloud, Firestore data and auth users exported and imported, API keys and auth configuration updated, billing account and IAM roles moved to the client’s team.
• Bitbucket. Repositories transferred into the client’s workspace, so the source stopped living in the previous agency’s org.
• Mailchimp. Audience and marketing automation reconnected to the migrated funnel.
• 2,605 records, reshaped. The lead export came out with 22 columns of CRM state; the Firebase import needed 11, in a different shape. The transform between them was the actual data migration, and the record count came out the same on both sides.

Inheriting a live system from another agency is one of the least glamorous and most common jobs in software, and it is almost never described honestly. The failure mode is not technical: it is the client becoming the message bus between the outgoing and incoming teams, answering questions neither team should be asking them.

What ELO delivered here was the absence of that. The client provided what only they could — account access, API key changes, payment cards on the new accounts — and the reconstruction, the migration sequencing, and the continued feature work stayed with us. Olympic Combat has since rebranded as United Kickboxing Academy — olympiccombat.io now redirects there — but the estate it runs on today is the one ELO migrated: in the client's own hands, not the outgoing agency's.

I bring high-leverage product engineering and absolute operational discipline: shipping weekly, pressure-testing user inputs, and automating delivery pipelines.

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