An everyday-size business, and the ceiling nobody could see

What I walked into

Three established brands, sold through department stores, specialty retailers, and drug stores across four continents — roughly three million dollars in revenue, and stuck there. Orders came in through seven disconnected sales channels, every one of them re-keyed by hand, so a single order passed through more than twenty manual decision points before it shipped. There was no CRM: customer conversations lived in email inboxes with no pipeline anyone could see. Inventory counts were unreliable because the e-commerce and accounting systems didn't talk, and the shipping team worked from printed picklists. Thirty years of ad-hoc technology decisions had left a back office that spent its days on data entry and reconciliation instead of anything that grew the business.

The real question

The owner assumed revenue had plateaued because the market had. My job was to test that. I came in through a government-funded digital-transformation assessment and mapped the whole operation from the ground up: I documented how orders actually flowed through each of the seven channels, traced inventory from raw materials to finished goods, and ran a gap analysis that surfaced five critical deficiencies and the operational risks hiding behind them. The picture that came back reframed the entire problem — the company couldn't process more orders without hiring more people to key them in by hand. The ceiling wasn't the market. It was the technology underneath it.

Proving it in numbers

A reframing is only useful if it's quantified, so I put the two futures side by side. To grow from three million to thirteen million on the systems they had would take roughly thirteen back-office staff — about seven hundred eighty thousand dollars a year in labour. The same revenue on an integrated platform needed about five people. That gap — on the order of four hundred eighty thousand dollars a year in avoided labour cost at scale — was the business case. For the first time the owner could see exactly where the technology was costing money, and how much.

What I delivered

Not a slide deck — a plan they could execute and pay for. I evaluated multiple ERP vendors against more than forty documented requirements, built five-year ROI projections, and recommended a standalone CRM as an interim step so the sales pipeline became visible while the larger integration was underway. The deliverable was a vendor-evaluated, costed roadmap with the implementation sequencing mapped out.

• Secured about one hundred fifteen thousand dollars in non-dilutive government funding — a DMAP reimbursement through the Ontario Centre of Innovation plus matching Technology Demonstration Program funds.
• Quantified about four hundred eighty thousand dollars a year in labour savings at the company's growth target, turning a vague "we need better systems" into a defensible investment case.
• Replaced a thirty-year tangle of disconnected tools with a single, right-sized target architecture — the same "one source of truth" fix, sized to the business they actually had, not the one a vendor wished they had.

Why it belongs next to the bigger engagements

It's the same playbook whether a company is doing three million or getting ready to sell: map what's really there, find the constraint that everyone has learned to live with, and put a funded, executable plan behind fixing it. (The systems half of this story — why the hiring ceiling was really a systems problem — is a longer piece on its own.)

Read Reyem Tech's write-up of this engagement →