Opinion and analysis on making technology earn its place in a small business.
Where we disagree with how small businesses are usually sold technology — and what we think is true instead.
Every established business has one. It works, everyone relies on it, and exactly one person understands it. That is not a tool — it is an unfunded risk sitting in the middle of your operation.
It wasn't the tool, and it wasn't the team being lazy. Dashboards fail for structural reasons that are entirely predictable — and knowing what they are tells you exactly what to build instead.
Automating something badly designed gets you more of the bad design, sooner, and at scale. The unglamorous work has to come first — and there's less of it than people fear.
Manual is the right answer more often than software people admit. It is also one of the largest costs in the business, and nobody has ever put it on a spreadsheet.
You already collect far more than enough. The reason it doesn't tell you anything is that no single system can see across all of it — and that is a much cheaper problem to fix than the one you think you have.
Most growing businesses don't have a software problem. They have a joining-up problem. Here's what we connect, what we automate around, and the fragile bits we tend to retire on the way through.
Bespoke software is the right answer far less often than the people selling it pretend. Here's an honest way to tell whether your business has actually earned it yet.
Connecting two systems is easy. Keeping them connected for three years without anyone thinking about it is a different discipline — and the difference is mostly design decisions made in the first week.
Management accounts are built for a different purpose than running a business next week. Understanding what they're for explains why they never quite answer your question.
The monthly price is the least important number in the contract. What matters is what you can get out, what it locks you into, and who owns the thing your business runs on.
Everybody says it and almost nobody has tested it. Ownership is not a contract clause — it is a set of things you can do without asking anyone's permission.
Tell us the job that keeps not getting done. We'll tell you if software can take it off you, and what it costs.
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