Text me for the fastest answer
406-690-7082. A text gets answered faster than anything else here — usually the same day on weekdays.
right now, by hand
9:04 pm
somebody is keeping something important alive.
Sometimes that's judgment no software should replace. Sometimes it's the same report rebuilt every week because two systems won't talk. I can't tell those apart from the outside, and I'm suspicious of anyone who says they can.
I read these myself and write back, usually the same day on weekdays. Nationwide, from Laurel, Montana.
What I keep seeing
Nobody decided this. It landed on somebody.
Every business I have worked inside has at least one. A number somebody rebuilds by hand every week. A list two systems both know about and neither will share. A step that exists because one person noticed something would otherwise fall through, and that has quietly belonged to them ever since.
There was no meeting. It landed on whoever was standing closest, it kept happening, and after a while it stopped looking like a problem at all. It looked like that person's job.
Some of that work should stay exactly where it is. Judgment, context, the read on a customer that no form field will ever hold — automate that and you have removed the wrong half. The rest is a machine's filing, done by somebody with better things to do.
Nobody assigned it. Everybody depends on it.
That is the shape I keep finding: work that is load-bearing and unowned at the same time. It survives because somebody good is quietly absorbing it, which is also why nobody upstream ever hears about it.
The recurring shapes
Four versions of the same problem.
None of these are technology failures, which is why buying more technology so rarely settles them. They are decisions nobody got around to making, still being carried by whoever noticed first. If one of them just put a name and a face in your head, that is the conversation.
The weekly rebuild
A number that has to exist by Friday, assembled by hand out of three places that each hold a piece of it. The work is real. The reason it is manual usually isn't.
The human integration
Two systems both know the customer and neither will tell the other, so a person copies, checks and reconciles — and becomes the only place the two versions ever agree.
The unowned handoff
Something arrives, and the next step depends on somebody noticing. Most days somebody does. The days nobody does are invisible, which is exactly why they keep happening.
The judgment call
Somebody reads the same list every morning and knows which three lines matter. That is not data entry, and writing a rule to replace it would cost more than it saves.
From noticing to built
I got tired of stopping at the recommendation.
For a long time my job ended with a document. Here is what is wrong, here is what I would do, good luck. Somebody else built it, or more often nobody did, and a year later the same number was still being assembled by hand.
So I learned to build the thing. Not because software is the answer to every one of these — plenty of them are a conversation, a decision and twenty minutes — but because "somebody should fix that" is not a finding, and I was tired of being the person who said it.
One of them stuck with me. A senior manager had been rebuilding the same report by hand every week — more than two hours of it, every week — and the data had been available through an API the whole time. Once somebody pulled it, he stopped. The whole story is on the about page.
Who's asking
Same person asks the questions and builds the thing.
Before this I ran marketing for a rental company with 32 locations in eight states, where a small broken process doesn't fail once — it fails 32 times. That is where I learned to read the seams instead of the surface, and it is still the first place I look.
Lead with the boring part
The useful version of this conversation isn't about me. It is about the thing somebody at your place redoes every week, and who it landed on.
Not everything needs software
A lot of these turn out to be a decision and an afternoon rather than a project. When that is the answer, it is the answer you get, and it costs nothing to hear it.
I stay responsible for explaining it
If I build something, I am the one who explains how it works and why it was built that way. No handoff to an account manager you have never met.
What I sell
Websites are the version of this I sell.
The most common place this shows up in a small business is the inquiry that arrives and then depends on somebody noticing it. So that is the part I turned into a product: lead-generation websites for service businesses, with the handoff behind them designed on purpose instead of assumed.
The full offer, the prices, and exactly where my responsibility ends are on the Websites page.
Elsewhere
I run a second practice.
ResolvHQ is my business-intelligence practice — a separate business with its own product and promise. If you came here about data rather than websites, it's this way.
The real question
so — what gets rebuilt by hand where you work?
Tell me what it is, who it landed on, and how often it happens. You'll get back which of the four shapes above it looks like, the two or three questions I would want answered before touching it, and whether I think it is worth building for at all. Sometimes it isn't, and that is a real answer.