A manifesto, of sorts
I've believed this for as long as I've been in business: life is complicated by spreadsheets.
They do about a quarter of the job. They scare a whole lot of people. And they somehow become the thing your whole business depends on — held together by one person who knows where the formulas are buried.
a spreadsheet does the first box. you're left doing the other three by hand.
And yet — here's the part people forget — a spreadsheet is a brilliant place to start. It's where you work out what actually matters. What you measure. What the process really is, underneath all the habit and the workarounds. A messy spreadsheet is a business thinking out loud.
The spreadsheet isn't the enemy. Staying there is.
The trouble was never the thinking. It was that turning that thinking into a proper, automated, web-based tool used to cost a fortune and take the better part of a year. So everyone just… stayed in the spreadsheet. Bent the business around it. Made it the tail that wags the dog.
What changed
What used to need a team of developers and a nine-month timeline can now be specced, built and launched in weeks. With Claude and the current generation of AI, the bespoke tool you always wanted — but could never justify — is suddenly within reach.
That's the whole reason SmartApps is back. The idea was always right. The cost of building it just fell off a cliff.
Where I come in
The hard part was never the code — it's working out exactly what the tool needs to do, what to keep, what to throw away, and how the whole thing should hang together. Thirty years of running businesses and reading P&Ls is what makes that part good.
I take your spreadsheet and your manual processes, and I turn them into a fully automated, web-based app that does all four boxes — capture, automate, share, scale — instead of just the first one.
No more buried formulas. No more "ask Dave, he built it."
If that's you
Bring the spreadsheet. We'll give it a proper send-off.