FourCorners.

FourCorners had three different partner relationships, three different data shapes, and zero glue between them — every new partner meant manual data entry and a back-and-forth chain of emails.

Network Partners, ATM Owners, and Site Partners each had different obligations, different training, and different data the team needed to capture. The existing process was: partner emails the team, team replies with a PDF, partner fills it out and emails it back, someone re-types it into Airtable. Same dance for every new site.

The team also needed partners to be able to check their own inventory and terminal data without pinging the operations team every time — but they couldn't get raw Airtable access, because that would let them see everyone else's data too.

One front door, three branching flows, and Airtable as the single source of truth that the rest of the stack reads from.

• Single entry point: a WordPress sign-up flow with OTP verification on the email, then a branch to the appropriate Gravity Forms based on partner type.
• LearnDash handles the training each partner type needs before they're activated — with completion gated against onboarding status.
• Airtable is the source of truth. Customer codes auto-generate, records link across tables, and Zapier wires the form events to the right table writes.
• Partner dashboard built inside WordPress that embeds filtered Airtable views, scoped to the logged-in partner's customer code — no leaking, no manual exports.

  ┌─ Partner clicks "Sign up"
  │
  â–¼
  ┌─────────────────────┐
  │ WordPress + OTP     │  Email verification
  └─────────┬───────────┘
            │
   ┌────────┼────────┐
   â–¼        â–¼        â–¼
 Network  ATM      Site
 Partner  Owner    Partner
 Form     Form     Form
   │        │        │
   └────────┼────────┘
            â–¼
  ┌─────────────────────┐
  │ Zapier dispatcher   │  routes by partner_type
  └─────────┬───────────┘
            â–¼
  ┌─────────────────────┐
  │ Airtable (source    │  customer_code auto-generated
  │ of truth)           │  records linked across tables
  └─────────┬───────────┘
            │
   ┌────────┴────────┐
   â–¼                 â–¼
 Partner          LearnDash
 Dashboard        training
 (filtered        (gates
 views)           activation)

• OTP-verified sign-up on Gravity Forms — one-time code to the partner's email before they can submit, so the data we keep is at least minimally trustworthy from day one.
• Three branching onboarding flows built on the same form engine but tailored to what each partner type needs to provide.
• LearnDash training paths per partner type, wired so completion flips a status flag in Airtable.
• Airtable automation: auto-generated customer codes (the unique key everything else hangs off), record linking across tables for partner / site / terminal, and event triggers that fan out to Zapier.
• Partner dashboard inside WordPress: each partner logs in and sees an embedded Airtable view filtered by their customer code. CSS clipping hides the parts of the embed that don't fit the brand. Lazy loading dodges Airtable's embed rate limits.
• DOOH rollout: compared major CMS platforms, picked the stack, then deployed 50+ Bluefin Windows IoT screens via ScaleFusion MDM. Wrote the deployment SOPs the team now uses to onboard every new site.

The ops team stopped re-typing form data. Partners can self-serve their own inventory and terminal data without an email thread. The vendor cost comparison I wrote became the document the company used to lock in the DOOH stack, and the SOPs became the playbook for every site rollout.

The unsexy parts — the customer-code generator, the Zapier dispatcher, the OTP step — are what made the whole thing actually work. Anyone can plug a form into Airtable. Making sure the right partner sees the right data, that training has to be completed before activation, that records link cleanly across tables, that's where the actual value sat.

Also: writing the SOPs as I built was a much better use of time than building first and documenting later. The doc was the spec.