Alpine Protection Group operates four tint + PPF shops across Colorado's Front Range — Denver (HQ), Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Fort Collins. Founded by Hannah Stein in 2018 as a single Denver shop, the business grew through measured franchise-style expansion: location 2 opened in Boulder in 2020, Colorado Springs in 2022, Fort Collins in 2024. Each location had its own software stack — a mix of TintWiz, OrbisX, paper-based PPF tracking, and Square. Hannah's monthly closing took 14 hours just to reconcile cross-location revenue.
The breaking point was royalty calculation. Alpine operates a structure where the HQ entity owns the brand and each location operator pays a 6% royalty on gross revenue. With four locations each on different software, Hannah's bookkeeper spent 16+ hours per month manually pulling revenue reports from each location, computing royalty, generating statements, and processing payments. The error rate was material — typically 2-4% of royalty was either over- or under-billed each month, requiring follow-up the next month.
The Q1 2026 migration to SalesThumb HQ consolidated everything. The rollout ran over 28 days:
- **Days 1-7**: Denver (HQ) migrated. Catalog standardized, royalty rules configured, brand standards documented. Hannah and the Denver operator trained.
- **Days 8-14**: Boulder migrated. Customer + vehicle import (920 records). Boulder operator trained.
- **Days 15-21**: Colorado Springs migrated. Operator trained. First cross-location customer transfer tested (customer from Denver got tint, drove to Colorado Springs for PPF — single customer record, both locations saw history).
- **Days 22-28**: Fort Collins migrated. Final operator trained. HQ dashboard live.
Six months in, the consolidated stack had delivered:
- Royalty automation eliminated 12 hours of bookkeeper time per month. The 6% royalty now calculates automatically on closed jobs and posts to each location's monthly statement.
- Cross-location admin (anything Hannah personally touched related to coordinating across locations) dropped 75%.
- Inter-location inventory transfers became frictionless. When Boulder ran short on a specific XPEL film roll, Fort Collins could transfer in 30 minutes via the HQ inventory view.
- Customer experience improved. Customers visiting multiple locations no longer had to "re-introduce" themselves. Service history was unified.
- Brand consistency tightened. Master catalog updates (new film tiers, warranty term updates, pricing changes) pushed to all four locations simultaneously.
The unexpected win: year-1 franchise revenue across the group lifted 22% versus the year before. Hannah attributes this to two compound effects. First, the [Smart Pricing](/features/smart-pricing) flag caught that the Colorado Springs and Fort Collins locations were under-priced versus their local markets by 8-14% on premium tiers — they raised prices and close rates held. Second, the unified customer database surfaced cross-vertical upsell opportunities that the siloed systems had missed.
"Before SalesThumb HQ, I was running four separate businesses that shared a logo," Hannah said. "Now I'm running one business that operates from four locations. The difference shows up in every operational metric."
The bookkeeper, freed of 12 hours per month of manual royalty work, was reassigned to cash-flow forecasting and budget variance analysis — the strategic work that had been deferred for years.
Alpine is now planning locations 5 and 6 for 2027 (Greeley and Pueblo). The HQ infrastructure now supports adding a new location in roughly 7-10 days of rollout time, versus the 60+ days it would have taken under the old stack.
See the [Multi-location tint franchise playbook](/guides/multi-location-tint-franchise-playbook) and [HQ rollout checklist](/kb/hq-rollout-checklist) for the operational template Alpine used.