A 115,000-member organization got 30% of their workday back with zero downtime.

SASS is the international governing body for the sport of cowboy action shooting and wild bunch action shooting. Founded in 1986. They issue 115,000+ memberships and affiliate over 500 clubs across 50 different countries.

Misty Ebersole joined SASS in 2009, became CEO in 2012, and became the sole owner in 2020 when the founding board retired.

As SASS continued to evolve, their Visual Basic system, from the early 1990s, stagnated. Small changes like changing the text in the welcome letter required reaching out to a developer who could take weeks to respond. Their data was subtly incorrect because the system did not enforce business rules that had changed during the last 40 years, as cowboy action shooting continued to evolve. Simply reporting on their membership numbers required third-party software (Crystal Reports) just to dump into an Excel file so they could format them.

Off-the-shelf software wasn't flexible enough to handle the intricacies of SASS's business. Offshore developers didn't understand the team's goals or business model. Custom software quotes were outrageous and often still failed to understand how the business ran. For over 15 years, Misty explored each path before reaching a dead end.

We immediately pivoted from the modernization project because we discovered the database that held all 40 years of SASS's data hadn't been backed up in more than 3 years. We couldn't begin building on top of this database when one mistake might erase an entire business. The previous developers had put SASS on a commercial development platform without the expertise to safely navigate or use it. After ensuring the database was safe and the team was able to recover from a catastrophic system failure, we resumed the migration.

We built the new system (Iron Horse) by documenting how SASS ran their business each day. Rather than begin with a pre-filled template, we looked at real paper applications to design the digital version. Each report, alert, and button was designed based on the team's workflows. We optimized for speed so Maria and Ruby could fly through the membership form while on the phone with a new member. We built reports that connected to the individual platforms Kendra needed to run end-of-month financial reconciliation. Throughout the entire process, the SASS team was our source of truth for each feature.

Iron Horse has been the team's only operations software since late 2025. In early 2026 we launched Phase two so members can manage every aspect of their membership online. Each month, several hundred memberships begin self-managing. Those used to be processed via phone call.

Quarterly reports that used to take staff more than 8 hours to put together, take less than 15 minutes. The team no longer jumps through multiple systems to answer questions like, "How many members renewed this month?" Kendra can close the books in hours, not days.