30+
Hours Saved Per Week
From automation and offloaded operations
5 of 5
HubSpot Hubs Activated
Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Operations
20+
Years of Broken Agency Trust, Finally Fixed
First marketing team in two decades that built trust
3
AI Transformation Areas
Content generation, chatbots, workflow automation
The Challenge
Where Things Stood Before
A HubSpot That Was Barely Scratching the Surface
Chris Middleton has spent his career helping humans navigate one of the most stressful parts of life: taxes. As Chief Tax Strategist and Co-Founder of Make Taxes Fair, he'd built a business grounded in advocacy, fairness, and genuine expertise. But behind the scenes, the operational backbone wasn't keeping up.
They had HubSpot. It just wasn't doing what they needed it to do. The platform was in place, the subscription was running, but the actual implementation? It was falling short. Contacts weren't organized. Workflows weren't firing. The tools that were supposed to streamline their business were creating more confusion than clarity.
The team was disorganized and struggling to keep track of the basics. When your CRM isn't working for you, it's working against you. Leads slip through cracks. Follow-ups get missed. The humans doing the work spend more time fighting the system than serving the humans who need their help.
Chris didn't sit still. He tried to work through the problems internally, rolling up his sleeves and digging into HubSpot's settings and configurations. When that hit a wall, he brought in another agency. Neither approach delivered the results Make Taxes Fair needed. The platform stayed underutilized, the disorganization persisted, and the frustration compounded.
After more than two decades of working with marketing teams and agencies, Chris had developed a pattern he'd come to expect: things start strong, promises sound great, and then trust slowly erodes as delivery falls short. He wasn't just looking for a HubSpot fix. He was looking for a partner he wouldn't want to throw through a window.
The Solution
What We Built Together
Building the Entire Engine, Not Just Fixing the Parts
When Make Taxes Fair connected with Sidekick Strategies, George and the team didn't start with a sales pitch. They started by listening. Really listening. Understanding what Chris had been through, where the gaps were, and what "working the way it should" actually looked like for a tax strategy firm with big ambitions and a small, mighty team.
The scope wasn't small. It was everything. Make Taxes Fair didn't need a band-aid on one hub or a quick template swap. They needed a full operational transformation. That meant implementing and optimizing all five HubSpot hubs: Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, and Operations. Each one configured to work together as a unified system, not five disconnected tools.
On the HubSpot side, the team rebuilt the foundation from the ground up. Contact management, pipeline architecture, automation workflows, reporting dashboards. Every piece was designed around how Make Taxes Fair actually operates, not how a generic template assumes they should. The migration from their previous setup preserved what mattered and cleaned out what didn't.
AI integration became a force multiplier across the business. Sidekick implemented intelligent automation in three key areas: content generation to fuel their marketing engine, customer service chatbots to handle common inquiries without burning staff hours, and workflow automation to eliminate the repetitive manual tasks that were eating the team alive.
The website and design work gave Make Taxes Fair a digital presence that matched the quality of their expertise. This wasn't a cosmetic refresh. It was a strategic rebuild designed to convert visitors into leads and leads into long-term relationships.
Content strategy and production rounded out the partnership. Blog articles optimized for SEO, video and podcast content to build authority, email sequences to nurture leads through the decision process, and pillar pages to establish topical dominance in their space. Every piece of content tied back to the broader growth strategy.
What made the difference wasn't just the breadth of services. It was the way the team showed up. George set the tone from the top: listen first, understand the business, then build solutions that actually fit. Every member of the Sidekick team carried that same energy. No hand-offs where context gets lost. No "that's not my department" deflections. Just a team that genuinely cared about making the work, well, work.
The Results
The Transformation
Trust Rebuilt, Time Reclaimed, and a Business That Finally Runs Smooth
The numbers hit first, and they hit hard. Make Taxes Fair saves over 30 hours every single week from the tools Sidekick implemented and the work the team takes off their plate. For a company with fewer than 10 humans, that's not an incremental improvement. That's a transformation. Thirty hours a week is practically a full-time employee's worth of capacity, redirected from fighting systems to serving the humans who need tax strategy help.
Team productivity skyrocketed. The workflows that used to require manual tracking, reminder emails, and spreadsheet gymnastics now run automatically. The HubSpot Operations Hub connects the dots between departments. The Sales Hub keeps pipeline visibility crystal clear. When everyone can see what's happening without asking three humans for updates, the whole organization moves faster.
Lead generation shifted from hopeful to systematic. With the Marketing Hub properly configured, content strategy driving organic traffic, and email sequences nurturing prospects through the funnel, Make Taxes Fair isn't just waiting for referrals anymore. They've got a repeatable engine that brings qualified leads to the door and guides them through a structured journey.
Customer retention strengthened as the Service Hub came online. Existing relationships got better because the team could actually track interactions, respond faster, and deliver consistent follow-through. The AI-powered chatbots handle routine questions instantly, which means the humans on Chris's team can focus their energy on the complex, high-value conversations that build loyalty.
But the result Chris talks about most isn't a metric. It's a feeling. "This is the first marketing team that has not eroded trust the longer we work together." After 20-plus years of agencies that overpromised and underdelivered, that sentence carries weight. It's not just satisfaction. It's relief.
They deliver what they promise, and they genuinely care about the business. That's not a tagline Chris was fed. That's what he says unprompted when you ask him what's different about working with Sidekick. The partnership doesn't just function. It flourishes. And for a business owner who'd learned to expect disappointment from marketing teams, that shift changes everything.
The ongoing partnership continues to evolve. New automations get layered in. Content strategy adapts to what the data shows is working. The five HubSpot hubs get refined as the business grows. Make Taxes Fair isn't locked into a deliverable list from six months ago. They've got a team that grows with them, and that's exactly what Chris spent 20 years trying to find.
“This is the first marketing team in over 20 years that I've worked with that I didn't want to throw through a window! They deliver what they promise, they listen with the intent to understand vs. just to respond, and I feel like I have a partner in my business that cares!”
Chris Middleton, Chief Tax Strategist and Co-Founder, MakeTaxesFair.com
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