How I Lost $50,000: When Global Talent Trumps Fancy Software

Greetings Extreme Outsourcer,

Allow me to entertain with a painful tail, at my expense.

A dark, twisted kind of thing, all twisted up with business’ little ironies.

It's the sort of story that makes me laugh, but only when I’m alone, in the bathroom, with the door locked.

It's a reminder that sometimes I get too damn clever for my own good.

Back when I was running our fast growing home improvement business, I was desperate for good management data.

Operational KPIs, Sales Data, Cash Balances, Backlogs, etc

You know, the stuff I needed to keep an eye on things.

My first attempt was all CRM based.

“Hubspot should be able to do this, right?”!”

Well, for a whole host of reasons (flakey sales people, changing deal stages, new processes) I never once was able to get what I needed.

Same thing with getting good data from the custom inventory system we built in Airtable.

Months later, and after much time and money invested, I still couldn’t get what I needed, reliably, from all my various systems.

To some extent, I was the cause of it.

We were growing and changing so fast, that a stabilized/automated dashboard was a moving target.

You see, no matter how much I tried to fine-tune a fancy piece of software, it just couldn't deliver the right output in the form I needed.

After banging my head against the wall over and over (FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY, JUST TELL ME HOW MANY SALES WE CLOSED LAST WEEK), I realized there was a much simpler, more affordable solution right under my nose.

I found an incredibly talented person from the Philippines to manually pull data from our CRM, accountant, and operational records.

In the precise form I wanted.

From diverse data sets.

Visualized exactly the way I like it.

And the best part - this process was highly flexible, and able to evolve and grow with the company.

If data was missing, I was also provided with a short explanation as to why (The crew chief didn’t give his install number on time).

Instead of fancy bloated software, my “data assistant”, on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, went out and got whatever data I needed.

In some cases, that was a simple export from our CRM.

In other cases, it was repeatedly texting members of our leadership team until they gave her the data.

She would then format them in the way that I liked…. every single day/week/month.

I was in heaven.

I was finally getting what I needed, in the form I needed.

$50,000 lighter… but I finally got what I needed.

So, what's the moral of this story?

Don't let my $50,000 mistake be in vain.

Sometime software (especially in SMB) isn’t flexible enough to solve your problem.

In so many cases, a low cost human is 10,000% better than some software, that is going to quickly stop focusing on SMB when they raise their series A, after being forced to sign a crappy long term contract, with bloated features, and unresponsive customer support.

If you think I’m sensitive to this topic, you are 100% right.

De-SaaS the world.

Yours in Outsourcing,

Jon

P.S. Here’s a biz owner I worked with, and helped them do some great stuff.

Doing interesting things and need my help? Holler at me.