Thirty-some years ago, you bought software that felt like a big bet. It paid off. You signed new clients, tracked every transaction with ease, and the business grew faster than you planned.
Today you’re still running that same software. The hardware around it has changed: Android tablets in the office, new computers that start in seconds. The software hasn’t kept pace. Each employee keeps their own spreadsheets, and none of them talk to each other. The data lives on individual computers, so the shared folder doesn’t help.
You watch your team and sense they produce less than they used to. Someone is always clearing a printer jam from another stack of reports, or untangling a quirk after a Windows update.
You did try to fix it last year. You went to a software expo, walked in, and found thousands of people, bright lights, and a wall of price tags. You turned around and left.
What you didn’t price in is the cost of hanging onto your antiquated systems. The bigger cost is the one person in your office holding it all together.
Someone knows which spreadsheet to trust, which step to do by hand, and what to do when the system freezes. Almost none of it is written down. If that person leaves, the software leaves with them.
You tried getting your team to write down their procedures. But you gave them little direction; you wanted to keep it open ended to see how well they’d do.
Three people turned in three documents in three formats, and two of them ended with “ask Linda.”
The next week, Linda didn’t show up on time. At 9:15, an email arrived. She had taken another job and wouldn’t be back.
Someone in your office holds the same knowledge. It can be captured now, before an email like that arrives.