At six in the morning, Mylapore is already awake. Flower sellers are threading jasmine outside the Kapaleeshwarar temple, filter coffee is hissing in the small hotels along the tank, and a group of eight visitors is gathering around Lakshmi, who has been leading heritage walks through these streets for nine years. Her small company, which we will call Thinnai Walks, runs four routes across Chennai: Mylapore, George Town, the Triplicane mansions and a Sunday evening stroll along the Marina. The walks are loved. The back office, until recently, was a tangle of scattered tools that nearly cost the team its busiest season. This is the story of how a four-person Chennai tour team untangled it.
The team and its tangle of scattered tools
Thinnai Walks is Lakshmi, who founded it; Karthik, a history graduate who leads the George Town route; Divya, who handles Instagram and the newsletter part-time; and Suresh, a freelance web developer who looks after the site when he can. Between them they had built up a remarkable amount of digital clutter without ever deciding to.
Bookings came through a form on the website. Lakshmi kept a spreadsheet of which search terms she thought mattered, updated whenever she remembered to check. Divya had her own content calendar in a notes app. Karthik stored his best route photographs on a hard disk at home. Suresh received website problems as WhatsApp messages, which arrived at all hours, mixed in with family chat. And the team’s shared “to fix” list was a sheet of paper taped inside the office cupboard.
Nobody thought of this as a problem. It was just how things worked.
The season that went quiet
The trouble surfaced in late November, usually the start of the team’s best months. Margazhi season brings music lovers into the city, and many of them want a morning walk before a concert. That year, bookings for December looked thin. Lakshmi assumed it was the rains.
Karthik was the one who noticed something odd. A visitor on his George Town walk mentioned that she had tried to book the Mylapore route twice through the website and given up, because the form kept showing an error on her phone. She had eventually booked George Town by calling the number she found on a review site.
Back at the office, the team pieced the timeline together. Suresh had updated a plugin in early October. The booking form had broken on mobile around the same time. Lakshmi had written “form weird?” on the cupboard list in mid-October after a friend mentioned it, but nobody had picked it up because the note did not say who should. Meanwhile her spreadsheet, last updated in September, could not tell her that the Mylapore page had also slid down the search results for “heritage walk Chennai” during those weeks.
Nearly two months of mobile bookings had been leaking away, and every piece of evidence had existed somewhere. It simply had not existed in the same place.
Deciding what to change
Lakshmi’s first instinct was to blame Suresh. Her second, after a long walk along the Marina, was more honest. “He was never told. The note was in a cupboard,” she said. “We built a system where things get noticed and then lost.”
The team sat down on a Sunday afternoon and agreed on a few principles. Recurring checks would happen automatically, not when someone felt like it. Every problem would become a piece of work with a person’s name on it. And all four of them would look at the same list.
Divya, who follows marketing blogs, suggested trying WizBrand as a shared home for the team’s SEO and creator work. Since the platform was in beta and cost nothing to begin with, no card required, the decision did not need a budget conversation.
The first audit
Suresh ran the site audit that week. It went through the Thinnai Walks website and flagged technical issues: the mobile form error, three walk pages with no meta description, a gallery with oversized images slowing down the homepage, and a broken link to an old Margazhi concert guide. Each item went straight into the task list. Suresh took the form and the images. Divya took the descriptions. Lakshmi took the broken link and decided to rewrite the guide entirely.
The form was fixed in two days. For the first time, everyone could see that it had been fixed, without asking.
Watching the right searches
Lakshmi replaced her spreadsheet with keyword research and rank tracking inside the same workspace. She chose a short list of phrases that real visitors type: “Mylapore heritage walk”, “George Town walking tour”, “things to do in Chennai morning”. Each one was now followed over time, with the movement between checks shown beside it.
Because the platform re-checks audits, rankings and the site’s certificate every night, Monday mornings changed character. Instead of Lakshmi wondering whether anything was wrong, the team opened a list of what had shifted overnight. When the Triplicane page dipped a few positions in January, they could see that an audit had flagged a slow image on that page the previous week. Suresh compressed it, and the page recovered.
Photos, posts and a new creator
Karthik’s hard disk was the next thing to go. His route photographs moved into the digital asset management area, where Divya could find a picture of the Armenian Church or the Parthasarathy temple gopuram without messaging him. Her content calendar moved into the social media management section, so posts sat alongside the site tasks rather than in a separate app.
The team had long wanted short videos of each route for visitors who like to preview a walk. Through the creator marketplace, filtering by city and by the platforms they cared about, Divya found a Chennai-based travel creator and booked a shoot for the George Town walk. The booking, the brief and the follow-up tasks all lived in one place.
What changed, and what did not
By the next Margazhi season, the difference was clear. Not because bookings exploded, but because nothing quietly broke for two months. Problems surfaced within a day. Tasks had owners. Suresh no longer received website issues as midnight WhatsApp messages; he received them as assigned items with context attached. Role-based access meant Divya could work on content without touching the site settings.
Some things did not change. The walks themselves remained the product. Lakshmi still writes the route notes by hand. And the team’s best marketing is still visitors telling friends, which is why they keep their pages genuinely useful, linking to resources like a practical starting guide for a first trip to Chennai and advice on how many days the city really needs.
The lesson Lakshmi tells other guides
When other Chennai tour operators ask her what made the difference, Lakshmi does not talk about software. She talks about the cupboard.
“We had all the information,” she says. “The form error, the search drop, the photos. It was just spread across a phone, a hard disk, a spreadsheet and a piece of paper. When we put it in one place and gave every problem a name, the work started finishing itself. I don’t mean it became easy. I mean it stopped disappearing.”
Then she usually checks her watch, because the next walk starts at six.
