Duct-taped systems

Every workaround felt like five minutes well spent at the time. The bill for all of them together comes due later, and it is bigger than anyone expected.

When I was running two shops and an online store, the systems that I had grown the business with were no longer optimised for the size of the business we had become. There was a till system in each shop. A separate platform for the website. A spreadsheet, because nothing else quite covered how we tracked stock for weddings booked eight months out. None of it was chosen. All of it accumulated.

This is not a technology problem. It is a decision-debt problem.

Every workaround was the right call in the moment it was made. But the cost started to show up once I started to add all of those moments together.

Where it actually starts

The first workaround always seemed reasonable, a quick fix under deadline pressure, meant to be temporary. But temporary fixes rarely get revisited, because revisiting them competes with the next urgent thing, and they quietly become permanent. Then a new workaround gets bolted onto the last one, and the patchwork grows.

Why founders let it accumulate

Fixing the underlying system always looks bigger than adding one more patch. So the patch wins the comparison, every single time it is made.
Nobody schedules time to look at the whole picture, because day to day, each individual tool is working fine. It is only the seams between them that are not.
Changing systems feels risky when the business is busy, so it keeps getting pushed to a quieter moment that, in a creative business, is often hard to predict.

What it is quietly costing you

Time lost to manual reconciliation that a properly connected system would do automatically.
Errors that only get caught when a client or supplier notices them first.
A much harder handover for anyone new, who has to be taught not just the job, but the workarounds layered on top of it.

What your thinking style has to do with it

Driver: adds the fastest fix available every time, and rarely returns to tidy it up, because moving to the next thing always feels more valuable than revisiting the last one.
Navigator: can see where the business is going but rarely drills into the operational plumbing underneath it, so the tools never get revisited until something breaks loudly enough to demand attention.
Connector: keeps an inefficient manual process going because it involves a person they like working with, and automating it can feel like removing that person’s role rather than freeing up their time.
Analyst: notices the mess clearly, then gets stuck comparing every possible fix in search of the perfect one, so nothing changes while the search continues.

A tool stack nobody designed on purpose is still a design. It is just one nobody would choose if they saw the whole thing at once.

What actually changes it

The coaching side names the avoidance pattern. The operational side is mapping the current patchwork honestly, then fixing the two or three seams causing the most pain first, rather than attempting a full rebuild nobody has time for.

An honest, one-page map of every tool currently in use.
The two tools causing the most manual work right now, fixed before anything else.
A standing rule that any new workaround gets a date next to it for when it will be looked at again.

This is the direct sibling of the systems blindspot earlier in this series – one is about the knowledge in your head, this one is about the tools patched around it. Where those seams sit closest to how clients experience the business, the Sharp Focus Onboarding session is often the fastest place to start.

The Sharp Focus on Pricing Confidence session is half a day with Kate. You leave with the language, the process and the practised confidence to hold your fees.