About Modus Create

Modus Create is a 350-person product and engineering firm with teams working across more than 50 countries. Their work spans custom product engineering to building the platforms and delivery pipelines that help engineering organizations ship at scale, with quality, and in a secure way. As a distributed company operating on this many fronts at once, Modus depends on tight coordination between the people it staffs and the client work it delivers.

The Situation Before Operating

Before adopting Operating, Modus Create ran without a dedicated professional services automation platform. The team leaned on general-purpose tools they already had, and in some cases stretched those tools' features well past what they were built to do.

The result was a problem every consulting business knows. "Too many people, not enough people, and managing all that and getting that balancing act is never ending," as Jon Allegre, the Chief Customer Officer at Modus describes it. Without a system of record, that balancing act had no single source of truth behind it.

"One of the things I stepped into before we started using Operating was 10 answers to the same question," Jon recalls. Resource planning was scattered across spreadsheets, Slack messages, and canvases, all stitched together by hand. The answer to who was available, or where a given person was allocated, depended on which document you happened to open.

Why Modus Chose Operating

What stood out to Modus was that Operating clearly came from people who had done the work themselves. "It was immediately obvious to us that this had been built by people who had lived our world," says Greg Martin, the COO at Modus Create.

For a technical team, the depth of the platform mattered too. Operating's AI capability, and specifically its MCP server, gave Modus a live, reliable read on who was available when planning a team. "The power of the AI capability, and specifically the MCP server within Operating, allows us to have an even more robust sense of resource availability and options when we're trying to build out a team plan."

Integrations with HubSpot, HiBob, and NetSuite

A big part of Operating's fit at Modus was its ability to connect to the systems the company already ran on. Modus tied Operating into their CRM, HR, and ERP so data flows automatically instead of being re-keyed:

HubSpot (CRM) - native integration: Pipeline and deal data flows into Operating, so resource planners see upcoming work coming out of sales and can staff against it early.

HiBob (HRIS) - native integration: Employee information and time-off data sync from HiBob into Operating. Approved leave and holidays show up as allocations, so resource plans always reflect who is actually available.

NetSuite (ERP) - API-based integration: Client, project, and financial data stays consistent between NetSuite and Operating, removing double-entry and keeping project information aligned across tools.

Together these connections put Operating at the center of Modus's stack. Sales, staffing, and HR look at the same data instead of maintaining their own versions of it.

Building Team Plans with the API and MCP Server

As a technical team, Modus uses Operating's API and MCP server heavily, and this is where the platform does some of its most useful work for them. The MCP server exposes real-time resource data to the AI tooling Modus already works with, so when the team is putting a plan together it can reason over live availability rather than a stale snapshot. Instead of one person hunting through documents to answer a staffing question, the data is queryable directly, and the options surface with it.

Keeping Projects on Track

Operating isn't only used at the planning stage. Modus's project managers work in it day to day to track planned versus actual hours and watch budget burndown as engagements run. That gives the PM team a running read on whether a project is tracking to plan, so overruns get caught while there's still time to act on them instead of surfacing at the end of an engagement. The same data that staffs a project also tells the team how it's performing once the work is underway.

Retiring Spreadsheets and Stitched-Together Tools

Modus had scaled this way before and knew where it ends up. "We've scaled spreadsheets from 50, 300, 2000 people". Spreadsheets keep working right up until they don't, and every added person makes the next reconciliation harder. Moving to Operating let Modus retire that patchwork of sheets, Slack threads, and canvases in favor of one place where planning and delivery actually live.

Built to Scale

With Operating in place, Modus has a foundation it can grow on without scaling the spreadsheet along with the headcount. "For us, Operating is the heart of how we manage our day-to-day with our customers and our team efforts, so being able to have a foundation that gives us the power to grow quickly is something we're very excited about."

For a company already spread across 50-plus countries, that foundation matters. The team can plan, staff, and track in one system, and the same setup that works today holds as they add people and clients.

Conclusion

Modus Create's move to Operating replaced a set of general-purpose tools, stretched past their limits, with a professional services automation platform built for the work they actually do. In doing so they went from "10 answers to the same question" to a single source of truth, connected HubSpot, HiBob, and NetSuite into one view, and put Operating's API and MCP server to work giving their technical team a live read on resourcing. Most of all, they now have a base they can scale on quickly, without going back to spreadsheets every time the company grows.

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