John
F.
Williams
III

Independently conceived and built a complete digital retirement planning system targeting Michigan's 380,000+ public school employees — from market research and product strategy through full technical execution. Built entirely alongside a full-time role.

• Architected a 5-table Airtable CRM with Make.com automation including webhook/JSON parsing and multi-step advisor notification workflow
• Built a Softr.io client portal with role-based access, integrated with the Airtable backend
• Designed the Retirement Success Score™ — a proprietary 0–40 composite scoring system across four planning dimensions used as the lead generation engine
• Developed a 30-video content library architecture segmented by educator career stage and hire date — wrote all video scripts, handled all photography for Sean's brand assets, built and operated the full recording studio setup (green screen, lighting, microphones), and personally directed, recorded, and edited all current videos in the system
• Full deployment stack: WordPress/Elementor, Cloudflare Pages, cPanel, GitHub, SendGrid with domain authentication

Inherited a manual sales reporting process that took 24+ hours to verify and was riddled with data retrieval failures. Redesigned it from the ground up into a fully operational production intelligence system — the single source of truth for over 74,000 annual business submissions, 393 agents, and $440M+ in annual production volume across 14 transaction types. The system drives weekly executive reporting, agent leaderboards, multi-year trend comparisons, and annualized pace projections — replacing fragmented manual processes with automated, always-current data.

• Reduced reporting verification time from 24+ hours to near-instantaneous through full process redesign and automation
• Powers all company sales contests — standings, category leaders, and real-time rankings are pulled directly from the system each week
• Drives a weekly production newsletter distributed to the full advisor base, spotlighting leaders across periodic, transfer, and life insurance categories
• Integrated Calendly appointment data to generate forward-looking production projections, connecting scheduled advisor activity to anticipated output
• Led SharePoint/Power Automate modernization: production dashboard, Fixed Annuity data entry form with conditional logic, and a formal management proposal to firm principals
• Cited as key contributor to a 39% boost in annual production across the advisor base

Designed and built a complete lead generation website for Nick Pagano, a 401(k) plan advisor at GLP Financial Group. Started from a PDF brochure and delivered a live, professional site with service agreements and client acquisition infrastructure.

• Built from PDF brochure to live production site — full design, copy, and development
• Drafted three formal service agreement options governing the client relationship (flat fee, retainer, per-client acquisition fee) under Michigan law
• Deployed and maintained via Cloudflare Pages and GitHub

Spearheaded the design and deployment of a QR code-based attendance and data collection system at Eastern Michigan University's Holman Success Center. The platform ran on personal smartphones — staff, students, and volunteers used a purpose-built mobile scanning app on devices they already owned, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware entirely. What began as a two-device pilot grew into a campus-wide system logging over 144,000 scans across dozens of event types — and produced documented academic outcomes.

• Scaled from 2 to 140 active scanning locations using personal mobile phones running a purpose-built app — no dedicated hardware required, enabling flexible deployment anywhere on campus across study tables, Gen Ed events, textbook checkout, tutoring, and supplemental instruction programs
• Demonstrated measurable GPA improvement for at-risk student-athletes and resulted in two Greek organizations being removed from academic probation
• Adopted by the EMU Athletic Department to support NCAA Division I academic reporting requirements — providing reliable attendance and engagement data for student-athlete eligibility and compliance tracking
• Built a QR-coded student ID database, designed validation workflows, and administered the full system end-to-end
• Recognized by CodeREADr in a published case study — described as "an entrepreneurial graduate assistant" who made the program "enormously successful"
• Saved the university $250K through an optimized shared reporting system adopted institution-wide as a template