The Founder’s Tech Bottleneck
The Founder’s Tech Bottleneck When every technical decision runs through you — and how to get out from under it By Steele Consulting You’ve become the person every technical decision runs through. That wasn’t the plan. In the early days it was simple — you were the...
Acquiring a Company?
The 5 software questions you need answered first By Steele Consulting Most acquisitions that fail don’t fail on the math. They fail on integration. And the single most common integration failure — the one that has quietly cratered more rollups and strategic...
Internal Software vs. Customer-Facing Software
Why they’re different games — and building one like the other is how projects fail By Steele Consulting A common conversation with a new client goes like this. The client tells us they need “custom software.” We ask what for. They describe a system that turns out to...
How to Kill a Software Project Before It Kills You
How to Kill a Software Project Before It Kills You The 5 signals that tell you to stop, and the playbook for actually doing it By Steele Consulting Every business owner who has been in a failing software project has been in this meeting. It’s the quarterly review. The...
Tech Due Diligence
What buyers actually look at when they look at your software By Steele Consulting If you’re planning to sell your business in the next 12 to 24 months — or even just take on serious outside investment — there’s a conversation you’re going to have that most founders...
What to Do When Two Reports Say Different Things
A diagnostic for reconciling — and why running it more than once means you need something else By Steele Consulting Every business hits this moment. Two reports come back on the same question. The numbers don’t match. Sales pulled Q3 at $2.4M. Finance pulled it at...
Your Company Is Paying for 47 Software Tools
Here’s what to do about that By Steele Consulting At some point in the life of every growing business, somebody asks the question that nobody wants to be the one to answer: “how many software tools are we actually paying for?” The team you’d expect to know — IT,...
Discovery vs. Delivery
Discovery vs. Delivery The two skills every software partner needs — and why most vendors have only one By Steele Consulting Every failed software project has a post-mortem, and most post-mortems end at the same shrug. The requirements were fine. The code was fine....
Where AI Actually Belongs in a Growing Business
And where it doesn’t By Steele Consulting Every business owner is being pitched AI right now. In email. In LinkedIn DMs. In vendor pitches. In the panels at every industry conference. The pitch is usually some version of: “you need AI in your business, or your...
Where AI Actually Belongs in a Growing Business
And where it doesn’t By Steele Consulting Every business owner is being pitched AI right now. In email. In LinkedIn DMs. In vendor pitches. In the panels at every industry conference. The pitch is usually some version of: “you need AI in your business, or your...
When a Spreadsheet Becomes a System
5 signs it’s time to rebuild By Steele Consulting Every business has one. The Excel workbook that started as a personal tracker for one person and somehow became the source of truth for something the business actually runs on. The master pricing sheet. The commission...
How to Tell the Difference Between a Process Problem and a Software Problem
How to Tell the Difference Between a Process Problem and a Software Problem The most expensive mistake in business technology is fixing the wrong one By Steele Consulting Every few months, a leadership team decides that something in the business isn’t working, and...