Your Business Runs on Data. So Why Is Your Data Running on Duct Tape?
There's a moment every business hits where you realize the spreadsheet isn't cutting it anymore. Maybe it's when someone overwrites a formula and the numbers stop making sense. Maybe it's when you need a report and it takes three days to pull together because nobody trusts the data. Maybe it's when you realize ten people are editing the same file and nobody knows which version is the real one.
We've seen this up close. And honestly, it's way more common than most businesses want to admit.
20,000 Rows and Zero Source of Truth
A while back, we worked with a client who was managing their entire customer database in spreadsheets. Over 20,000 rows. Ten people touching the same sheets daily. Formulas getting overwritten. No version control. No standard process for how things got updated.
The result? Nobody trusted the numbers. Reports were painfully slow to produce, and when they did come out, they were usually wrong. Decisions were being made on bad data, which is really just a polite way of saying decisions were being guessed.
The business couldn't move forward—not because they didn't have the talent or the strategy, but because the foundation everything sat on was broken. Business runs on data. When the data is unreliable, everything downstream from it is unreliable too.
Find the Biggest Win First
When we stepped in, we didn't try to fix everything at once. We didn't pitch a six-month roadmap or a massive platform overhaul. We did something simpler: we sat in.
We observed how the team actually worked. Watched the processes. Asked questions. Because here's the thing—the people inside the business know their problems better than anyone, but they're also too close to see the full picture. The value of an outside partner isn't that they know more. It's that they have a higher-level view and can spot the patterns that are invisible from the inside.
What we found was that the biggest pain point—the thing causing the most damage and costing the most time—was the lack of a single, reliable source of truth. Everything else was downstream of that. Fix the data, and a dozen other problems start resolving themselves.
So that's what we built first. A data and knowledge management platform, focused on unifying their information into one system that people could actually trust. We built it in a week. The ROI paid for that week of building within the first month, mostly from how drastically it cut reporting time alone.
The Team Started Enjoying Their Work Again
This is the part people don't talk about enough. When you remove dreadful, boring, error-prone manual work from someone's day, they don't just become more productive. They become more engaged.
Once the system was live, the team stopped dreading the data work. They weren't manually reconciling spreadsheets or second-guessing numbers anymore. The metrics were just correct. Reports that used to take days were happening fast. And all that freed-up time and mental energy went straight into the work that actually mattered.
That shift in morale is hard to put a dollar amount on, but anyone who's managed a team knows it's real.
Stop Buying Solutions That Are Looking for Your Problem
Here's something we see a lot: a business decides they need to fix their operations, so they go out and buy an expensive off-the-shelf tool. An enterprise CRM. A big ERP system. They pay a premium and hope for the best. "It's expensive, so it's probably going to work."
Then three months later, half the team is back in spreadsheets because the tool doesn't fit how they actually operate.
The issue isn't that these tools are bad. It's that the business skipped the most important step: discovery. They bought a solution before fully understanding the problem.
Here's what we've learned. Your solutions should come from your problems—not the other way around. You don't start with the tool and hope it fits. You start with the pain, understand it deeply, and then build what actually addresses it.
Discovery Isn't a Phase. It's the Whole Foundation.
There's a kind of soft rule we operate by: every additional hour you invest in discovery makes the direction of the solution exponentially more accurate. It's not a one-and-done conversation where you brief someone and walk away. It's an ongoing process of observing, asking, refining, and getting explicit about what the actual problems are.
That's the part most businesses underinvest in. Not money—time. They'll write the check for the software, but they won't put in the hours to make sure the people building it truly understand the context. And without that context, even the best-built system will miss the mark.
The businesses that get the most value out of custom solutions are the ones willing to be partners in the discovery process. Clear direction. Honest communication about how things actually work versus how they're supposed to work. That investment in clarity is what makes the difference between a tool that sits unused and a system that transforms how the team operates.
Impact Is a Formula. Long Timelines Don't Have to Be Part of It.
There's a misconception that building something custom means a huge budget and a six-month timeline. It doesn't have to. We built a platform in a week that solved a problem the client had been living with for years. The key wasn't that we moved fast—it's that we knew exactly what to build because we invested the time upfront to understand what actually needed fixing.
When you pair sharp discovery with focused execution—targeting the maximum output, the most painful thing you can fix immediately—the timeline compresses dramatically. You're not building everything. You're building the right thing.
What We Took Away
That client engagement changed how we operate as a company. The framework—observe deeply, find the biggest win, build it fast, measure the impact—became part of how we approach every problem now. It works for clients, and it works internally.
A few things that stuck with us:
Start with observation, not assumptions. Sit in. Watch the processes. The real problems are often different from what people initially describe, not because they're wrong, but because they're too close to it.
Build from problems, not from tools. The right solution is the one shaped by the actual pain point, not the one that looked good in a demo.
Discovery is the highest-leverage investment. The more time you spend understanding the problem, the less time and money you waste building the wrong thing.
Small, focused builds can have massive impact. You don't need to overhaul everything. Sometimes one well-targeted system changes the whole game.
Don't forget the human side. When you take away the painful, manual, error-prone work, people don't just work faster—they work better and actually want to show up.
If your business is still running critical operations on spreadsheets and gut feel, it's probably not because you haven't found the right tool yet. It's because nobody has taken the time to really understand what you need. That's the part worth investing in.