A family studio building the software we needed ourselves.

Nathan is the principal designer and implementer behind everything Crawford Designs builds — the websites, the software, and the design work.

By day he is a senior analyst at a Fortune 500 technology company, the most recent step in more than twenty years of enterprise technology work. Along the way he has been a project manager running security-operations rollouts, a solutions analyst responsible for testing and releasing software to thousands of users, a corporate trainer who built a company-wide training program from scratch, and a financial analyst supporting a regional controller. He holds a B.S. in Information Technology with a specialization in Information Systems Security.

That history is why this platform looks the way it does. He has spent two decades watching capable people bounce off software that was never designed for them, and has trained enough users to know that anything needing a manual will quietly go unused.

He has sung lead in barbershop choruses since 2007 and holds five international gold medals with the Westminster Chorus and the Masters of Harmony. He has served on the boards of three different chapters in very nearly every role there is — so the jobs this platform is built to make easier are jobs he has personally done.

Janey looks after marketing, social media, and how Crawford Designs talks to the people it works with. She is also the person Nathan brings every idea to first, and the one who tells him honestly whether it holds up, a role that has quietly shaped more of this platform than either of them would claim.

By day she is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst who has worked with individuals with autism for more than ten years. She is the campus BCBA at a local school, where she manages a team of behavior technicians and works alongside teachers, occupational therapists and speech-language pathologists to support students.

That work rests on a discipline this company borrowed wholesale: start with the person in front of you, and change the system to fit them rather than asking them to fit it. She is the one who asks whether a new feature will make sense to a volunteer at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night. The groups we build for are chasing something they love, and making that easier is the part she cares about most.

Janey joined a barbershop chorus accidentally, having been quite certain she was auditioning for an a cappella group, and stayed for the friendships she found there. She met Nathan in that chorus, which makes barbershop a fair part of the reason this company exists at all. She served as the chapter’s secretary, where her note-taking and organization were often praised. She later sang tenor with Euphonix, taking a District Novice Quartet Championship with them. She no longer competes, but continues to serve as the quartet’s PR manager.

Lee is Nathan’s father, and the one who looks after the money. Invoicing, the books, and keeping the company current on tax and the wider legal side of running a business, so that the person building your website is not also the person reading up on filing requirements at midnight.

He spent more than thirty-five years in financial analysis and control, most recently as financial controller for a major security company, and brings a long background in asset management with him. He is now retired, which in practice means he has more time for this than the rest of us.

Thirty-five years of controllership is a long apprenticeship in two things: being right, and being right on time. The groups Crawford Designs bills are volunteer-run and counting every dollar, and his standard for that is a simple one. The numbers are accurate, an invoice says what it means, and a question about a charge gets answered quickly rather than eventually.

He does not sing himself. He has spent the years in the audience instead, following his son through the whole of his barbershop journey and turning up at international competitions along the way. It is a more useful vantage point than it sounds. He has been watching what these organizations ask of the people who run them for far longer than this company has existed.