Tech PipelineCompanies whose stack has outgrown their ops team
We work best with mid-market teams where the systems, processes, and reporting were set up for a smaller version of the business and nobody has had the time to catch them up.
The shapes of company we see most
Companies in the awkward middle
Past startup, not yet enterprise. Revenue is growing faster than the back-office can keep up. The ERP was picked two years ago. The BI stack was chosen three years ago. Neither was sized for where the company is now.
Post-migration teams
A system rollout that was supposed to replace the old one. Partway through, priorities shifted, and now both run. Integrations are partial. Data lives in two places. Nobody has the time to finish the job.
Operations and finance leads
Controllers who need the close to stop slipping. Ops leaders whose team is spending too much time reconciling data that should match. Senior managers who can feel the drag but cannot point to the single cause.
Platform and systems owners
The person who owns Salesforce, or NetSuite, or the internal ticketing tool. Knows the product deeply. Does not have the bandwidth to untangle every upstream and downstream integration.
Engineering and product leaders
A VP or director inheriting an execution setup that has drifted. Multiple backlogs. Planning out of sync with delivery. Commitments made against tools the team no longer uses.
Recently-reorganized teams
A reorg moved a process across a new boundary. The ownership never fully transferred. Now a handoff that used to be one team is a three-team conversation and nothing is moving.
Who usually brings us in
- •COO, VP operations, or head of ops
- •CFO, controller, or VP finance when the problem crosses into systems
- •VP product or head of delivery
- •CTO or VP engineering owning internal systems
- •BizOps or systems lead inside the company
- •Founders or GMs who are carrying the ops work themselves
Usually someone who sees the problem close enough to describe it, and has enough authority to pay for the fix and protect it while it lands.
Situations that usually trigger a call
Two teams are reporting different numbers
Revenue, pipeline, utilization, whatever the metric is. One team built it in the source system. The other built it in the spreadsheet. Leadership has been asked to pick a version and does not want to.
A vendor tool is paid for and half-used
The procurement system, the PPM tool, the customer data platform. It got bought, a few teams adopted it, and the rest kept working around it. The renewal is coming.
Month-end keeps eating the week
Close cycle has grown quietly. The reasons change each quarter. Manual exports. Late data. A rule in the ERP that does not match the way the business now books revenue.
A new leader inherited an execution mess
A new VP, new head of ops, new CTO. The backlog is long, the priorities are unclear, and three months in they want an outside read on what to fix first and what to leave alone.
The single point of failure is a person
One operator runs the process. They have been there four years. The documentation is stale. Everyone knows what happens if they leave and nobody wants to say it out loud.
Where we do the best work
- •The problem is specific enough to describe in a paragraph
- •Someone on your side will own what we build
- •There is a budget for the fix, not just the diagnosis
- •You are willing to cut scope that we agree does not belong in the engagement
When we are not the right call
- -Situations looking for a branded framework or a slide deck to circulate internally
- -Strategy work on market positioning, pricing, or product direction
- -Pre-revenue ideas with no operating context yet to examine
- -Engagements where the answer is already decided and someone just wants cover for it
If any of this sounds familiar, send us a note
A few lines on what is breaking and who has been working around it is enough to start. We will tell you whether it looks like our kind of work.