I got a message from a founder last month asking for help. They’d spent forty thousand dollars on an AI automation platform, hired a consultant to set it up, and after three months they had exactly zero processes automated. They had dozens of workflows configured. None of them were running. I asked them what they automated first. They told me…
Over the past fifteen years, I’ve watched founders make one mistake so consistently that it’s become predictable. They copy the operational metrics from companies ten times their size, spend months building dashboards that look impressive, and then wonder why none of it tells them what’s actually happening in their business. I don’t mean they’re careless. They’re usually the opposite. Founders…
Over the past fifteen years, I’ve watched a pattern emerge so consistently that I can almost predict it now. A startup is moving fast, shipping features, gaining traction. Then somewhere around month six or eight, a customer asks: “How are you handling our data under CCPA?” Or a founder reads an article about GDPR and realizes they haven’t thought about…
A Series A startup I worked with had a problem that felt straightforward: they needed a better way to manage customer onboarding workflows. Their customers were signing contracts through DocuSign, then getting added to their platform through a manual process that took a day or two. It was slow. It created bad first impressions. It was holding back growth. The…
There’s a moment in almost every startup’s growth that feels inevitable: somebody on the founding team takes a product demo of Salesforce, sees the colorful pipeline visualization, watches a sales rep close a deal in the system, and announces: “We need this.” Usually it’s the VP of Sales or a founder who just hired their first three reps. Usually it…
There’s a moment in every startup’s growth that feels like it snaps overnight. You go from twelve people who all know what the other eleven are doing to thirty people, and suddenly nobody knows what’s happening. You’re still shipping. Revenue is still growing. But somewhere between the daily stand-ups and the Slack threads, the collective knowledge that used to live…
Every few years, a shift comes along in the Salesforce ecosystem that makes you rewrite how you think about implementation. Lightning did it. Flow Builder did it. Data Cloud did it. And now Agentforce is doing it again — except this time, the shift isn’t really about a new interface or a new automation tool. It’s about handing a piece…
A few years back, I sat in a requirements session with the administrative staff of a mid-sized private school, and about forty minutes in, the office manager pulled up her screen to show me how she tracked tuition payment plans. It was a spreadsheet with eleven tabs. One tab per grade level, colored cells for who’d paid, a separate tab…
Disclaimer: Client scenarios described in this article are illustrative composites drawn from common patterns seen across socio-economic and business analysis work, not references to any specific identifiable client or engagement. Over the past couple of years, our team has fielded a version of the same request more times than I can count: an organization — sometimes a government agency, sometimes…