How The Garden Built a Fully Segregated HubSpot Business Unit for Simonds Homes' WA Joint Venture

Simonds needed the WA JV sales team to operate inside the same HubSpot portal as the core Simonds business, reusing familiar processes, reporting structures, and ways of working, while guaranteeing that JV customer data, leads, and staff access remained fully separate from Simonds for legal reasons.

Every existing asset (contacts, deals, companies, forms, marketing emails, workflows, and reports) had originally been built without this distinction in mind, so nothing could simply be duplicated. It had to be re-architected so that Simonds and JV data never crossed over, while both business units kept a consistent, "like-for-like" experience of HubSpot.

On top of the data segregation requirement, the project carried a fixed go-live deadline, meaning the technical build, testing, and handover all had to land inside a tight, single-sprint timeline.

1. Discovery & Data Strategy

• Reviewed the existing Simonds HubSpot architecture to identify every object, property, and workflow the WA launch would touch.
• Mapped out a partitioning approach using HubSpot's native Business Unit functionality to keep WA JV data legally and operationally distinct from Simonds.
• Defined user permission and team structures so JV access could be cleanly separated from Simonds staff, with Admin as the only shared layer.

2. Business Unit Environment Build

• Created and configured the new WA Joint Venture Business Unit, aligning it with the existing HubSpot portal structure.
• Set up brand-level configuration for the JV, including logo, domain, colours, fonts, and styling, so JV-facing assets are visually distinct from Simonds.
• Reassigned every existing asset (standard and custom objects, marketing emails, forms, reports, dashboards, and workflows) to the Simonds brand first, establishing a clean baseline before any JV-specific build began.

3. User & Team Setup

• Stood up a dedicated JV Team inside HubSpot to support lead routing, permissions, and reporting.
• Onboarded an initial test user to validate workflow functionality, reporting accuracy, and round-robin lead distribution ahead of wider rollout.

4. Lead Capture, Routing & Segmentation

• Configured the JV enquiry form so every submission is automatically tagged with the JV brand and creates (or updates) a contact in a dedicated JV Contacts view, with no risk of duplicating or crossing over with Simonds contacts.
• Built a round-robin workflow that automatically assigns ownerless JV leads to JV Team members in rotation, only firing once at least one active user sits in the team.
• Created a "JV | Contacts List" active list to isolate every JV lead, used both for reporting and as a suppression filter.
• Added that same suppression list to existing Simonds workflows so JV contacts are automatically excluded from Simonds-specific automation and vice versa.

5. Workflow Automation

• Built a Lead Creation Autoresponder to acknowledge new JV leads automatically (email content finalisation held pending client sign-off).
• Built a Task Assignment workflow that creates and assigns a follow-up task the moment a JV lead is given an owner.
• Built a Simonds-only "Auto Set Brand on Contact Creation" workflow to backfill the Simonds brand on any contact missing one, explicitly excluding JV leads.

6. Reporting & Dashboards

• Introduced a user-level "Brand" property so User Effort Scorecard records automatically inherit the correct brand from each user.
• Filtered all Effort Scorecard reporting by brand, giving WA JV leadership a clean, JV-only view of calls, contacts, deals, walk-in traffic, deposits, and sales advice performance against target, refreshed daily.
• Validated that every report displayed JV-only data with no cross-brand visibility.

7. QA & Technical Handover

• Ran a full end-to-end test of the form-to-contact-to-workflow-to-owner-assignment flow, covering both scenarios (JV Team with and without active users).
• Audited data segregation rules across contacts, workflows, and reporting to confirm no cross-over between Simonds and JV.
• Delivered a full technical handover session and documentation, including step-by-step test criteria so the internal team can validate the setup themselves going forward.

Secure, Fully Segregated Multi-Brand Environment: Simonds and WA JV now operate inside a single HubSpot instance with genuine data isolation. Contacts, staff, workflows, and reporting for each brand are kept fully separate, satisfying the legal requirement behind the Joint Venture.

Consistent, "Like-for-Like" Process for the WA Team: By replicating Simonds' proven sales and marketing infrastructure rather than building from scratch, the WA JV team can operate with a familiar, tested process from day one.

Automated Lead Routing from First Enquiry: JV leads are automatically captured, brand-tagged, and distributed to the JV sales team via round-robin, removing manual lead assignment entirely, with task creation built in to keep owners accountable.

Brand-Safe Automation Across the Whole Portal: Suppression logic built from the JV segment now protects existing Simonds workflows from JV cross-contamination, so both brands' automation runs cleanly without manual policing.

Brand-Specific Performance Visibility: WA JV leadership can now track team performance, including calls, deals, walk-ins, deposits, and sales advice, through a dedicated Effort Scorecard dashboard, filtered exclusively to JV data and refreshed daily.