“We enter it twice.”
The same order, job, or payment gets re-keyed across tools that don’t sync. Spreadsheets fill the gaps. Someone is always chasing which file is latest.
Custom software, built around how you run
Stop adapting your business to fit your software. Build the system around the work.
I help companies whose critical processes still run on re-keying, outgrown spreadsheets, and tools that don’t fully talk. Together we define a clear business outcome, then design and build the system to get there.
Start free: 30–45 minutes and a written assessment of one painful process. You keep the write-up either way. The next step, only if it’s worth it: a paid discovery sprint you own even if someone else builds it.
I’m Tyson Crane. I design and build it myself, start to finish. The symptoms
If this sounds like your week, keep reading
I lead with what operators actually say, not “digital transformation.” If none of these hit, I’m probably not your person, and that’s fine.
“The data’s there. We just can’t get the reports.”
Leadership flies half-blind until month-end. Real answers still mean exporting to Excel. Decisions wait on a heroic reconciliation.
“It all lives in one person’s head.”
A few people make the exceptions work. A vacation breaks the company. You’re not sure you could sell the business, or even survive without them.
Inventory, schedules, and handoffs slip
Wrong stock, delayed jobs, customers waiting, and high-paid people stuck on manual glue work between systems.
Off-the-shelf almost works
You’ve already bought the CRM, the accounting package, the scheduling tool. And you’re still re-keying. The gap is the process the software never quite fit.
None of this stops business from happening today. That’s exactly why it doesn’t get fixed. You’re focused on fulfillment, customers, and the daily things that come up when you run a company. But as you grow, it’s what caps you: highly paid people re-entering data, mistakes that cost time and money, and no way for leadership to see what’s actually happening in the numbers.
The difference
Not a dev shop
A dev shop
Asks “what do you want built?”, builds exactly that, and hands it over. If it doesn’t move the business, the answer is “well, we built what you told us.”
How I work
We define the outcome first, map how you actually run, then build the minimum that reaches it, with you in the loop the whole way.
I’ve watched this movie a dozen times: the dev shop asks “what do you need?”, builds exactly what you said, and then it doesn’t get the outcome you expected. “Well, we built what you told us.” What you’re getting instead is a deployed engineer, architect, and product manager who comes to work inside your business. Someone who understands the economics and the people, not just the code.
The range
The smallest thing that fixes it
Custom software is one answer, not the answer. The assessment’s job is to find the smallest change that moves the outcome, including when that costs a lot less than hiring me to build something.
Fix what you already own
You’re probably already paying for a CRM, an accounting package, or a job, inventory, or scheduling system that covers most of the work. Often the fastest win is configuration, a cleaner process, and training. No new software at all.
Connect what you have
Double-entry usually isn’t a missing system, it’s two systems that were never introduced. An integration between them can retire hours of re-keying in days rather than months.
One focused tool, or an AI assist
A single job done well: intake that files itself, a form that replaces the shared spreadsheet, or an assistant that reads incoming emails and documents so nobody re-types them.
The full system
When the process is genuinely yours and spans people, stages, and reporting, it earns a real build. That’s the engagement laid out below.
On AI: it’s genuinely good at the re-keying, reading documents, and drafting the repetitive work. It’s also the easiest way to waste money. It works on top of clean process and clean data. So we fix the process first, then let AI do the part it’s actually good at.
The engagement
How it works
Every phase is fixed-scope, and every phase ends with something you own, whether or not you continue.
01
A conversation and a written assessment
FreeWe set up a 30–45 minute discussion and just talk about your business: the process, the pain points around it, what it’s costing you, and the outcome you want. From that, I write up an assessment: what you’re facing, what you’re trying to accomplish, and likely approaches worth considering.
Yours to keep either way. Enough to decide whether this is important enough to the business to be worth exploring.
02
Discovery sprint
Typically $2,500–$5,000 Credited toward the build
A deeper dive where we actually map it out:
- Your current process and workflow, beginning to end
- The systems touched, what’s in place, and what those can do
- The data that’s available and how it’s structured
- The problems we’re solving and the outcomes we’ll measure
- Prototypes and mockups so you can see what the solution could look like
- What the rollout and adoption would realistically take
The deliverable is a scoped plan you own. Take it and build with someone else if you like. If you move forward with me on the build, the sprint fee is credited toward it.
03
The build
Priced after the sprintWe build it together, one piece at a time. You see it along the way and make sure it works for your business. That includes the part most projects skip: training for your people, the actual rollout, and tracking adoption and the outcome for 60 days after launch, with follow-ups at 30 and 60 days.
Your system is yours: documented and portable. Price depends on scope, agreed before we start.
Ongoing
Maintenance and new phases
Things come up: small bugs, edge cases, “X feature would be really valuable now that we’ve used it a month.” Small items run through a maintenance arrangement; anything significant gets scoped honestly as its own phase.
Worked example
What this looks like in practice
A representative walk-through. It shows the kind of problem and how the engagement runs, not a past client. I’m early in this practice and won’t dress up a hypothetical as a case study.
The situation
A ~40-person distributor. Quotes live in a spreadsheet, then get re-keyed into QuickBooks, then again onto a purchasing sheet. Inventory is planned off a workbook that’s always a little out of date, so the company periodically schedules the wrong amount of stock. When a big order comes in short, the customer goes to a competitor who has it on the shelf. One person carries the reorder logic in his head. Leadership can’t see true margin per job until the books close a week into the next month.
What we’d map
In the discovery sprint we’d walk the whole flow, from quote to order to purchase to fulfillment, and pin down the outcome that matters most. Here, likely: fewer orders lost to stockouts, with a couple of supporting measures (re-keying eliminated, month-end visible in days not weeks). We’d document the reorder rules living in one person’s head so they stop being a single point of failure.
What we’d build
QuickBooks stays as the financial ledger. No rip-and-replace. On top of it we’d build the operational layer the business is missing: an order entered once that flows through to purchasing, reorder signals based on the rules we documented, and a live view of margin by job. The first version is deliberately the minimum that moves the outcome, not every feature imaginable.
How we’d know it worked
We’d run it alongside the old process for a few weeks, pilot with the ops lead, then train the team. At 30 and 60 days we’d check the number we agreed on up front. Are fewer orders slipping to competitors? Is the team actually using it? If yes, great. If not, that feeds the next round of work.
The payoff
What a quieter week actually looks like
None of this is magic. It’s what happens when a process gets designed once and then enforced by the system, instead of by memory, follow-up, and a few people being heroic.
It runs without you in the room
Steps are enforced, handoffs get their own reminders, and the exceptions are written down instead of remembered. You take a week off and nothing catches fire.
You can see the business between month-ends
Real numbers when you ask for them, not a week after close. Margin by job, status by order, without anyone exporting to Excel and reconciling it by hand first.
The re-keying is gone
Entered once, it shows up everywhere it’s needed. The people you pay well go back to the work you hired them for instead of being the glue between systems.
The company is worth more
A business that runs on documented systems is an asset someone can buy. One that runs in three people’s heads is a job you own, and buyers discount that hard.
Straight answers
The questions serious buyers ask
Hiring one person to build something your operation depends on raises fair questions. These are the three I get most, answered specifically rather than with reassurance.
“What if something happens to you?”
The honest risk of hiring one person. It’s why documentation, architecture notes, and a handoff plan are deliverables inside the build, not favors at the end. The code lives in your repository and the system runs under your accounts from day one, so any competent developer can pick it up without me in the room.
“Who actually owns what we build?”
You do, and it’s written into the contract rather than implied. Source code, documentation, data, and credentials are yours, in your accounts. No per-seat license, no platform fee, and nothing that stops working if you stop paying me. You can hand it to anyone to take forward.
“Can you meet our security and compliance requirements?”
I built financial-services software used inside large U.S. institutions, where access control, auditability, and data handling had to be right before a feature shipped. Your industry’s rules get treated as design inputs at the start, not retrofitted after someone in compliance asks the hard question.
Background
Who you’d be working with
Tyson Crane
Product manager · engineer · architect
linkedin.com/in/tysoncrane
I led product at a fast-growing software company, from single-digit employees to nearly fifty, and sat on the executive team. I’ve built hundreds of features and taken multiple products from an idea to something real that businesses pay for.
The software I designed and built runs at some of the biggest financial institutions in the U.S., used by hundreds of thousands of financial professionals. That means I’ve lived through the security, auditability, and governance requirements the most demanding buyers in the world put on software.
More recently, at a data and AI company, my job was reviewing custom software projects across many client companies. I saw firsthand what makes implementations succeed and what makes them fail. That’s where the emphasis on defined outcomes, phased scope, rollout planning, and adoption tracking comes from. It’s not theory; it’s pattern recognition from watching a lot of projects.
And because I grew up inside a company as it scaled, wearing the hiring hat, the training hat, and the management hat, I understand that a process is people and roles lining up to an outcome, not just a piece of software.
Think of it as hiring a senior engineer, architect, and product manager from a big software company, embedded in your business for the length of the project.
Honesty
An honest note on fit
Custom software is not always the answer, and I’d rather tell you that in the first conversation than after a check clears.
- If one off-the-shelf tool already covers about 90% and the gap is training or discipline, fix adoption. Don’t custom-build.
- If the process isn’t stable yet, pin it down first. Encoding a moving target in software just locks in the chaos.
- If a spreadsheet or no-code tool genuinely closes the gap at your scale, keep it. I’ll say so in the assessment.
- Custom makes sense when the process is genuinely yours, an outcome can be defined and measured, and you want to own the result instead of renting it.
Who this is for
- A critical internal process still hung up on manual effort, or on tools that only cover ~70% of the work
- An executive stakeholder who owns the outcome, plus a day-to-day product owner who knows the work
- Big enough that thousands to tens of thousands for a clear outcome is a serious conversation
- Willing to phase: minimum viable first, then improve from real use
- A partner mindset: available for decisions, not “pay and disappear”
Who I’ll turn down
- No executive buy-in or budget path
- Constantly changing direction with no decision process
- Every bell and whistle before any outcome is proven
- “We paid you, now make it perfect without any of our time”
- You need commodity SaaS setup or unlimited ticket support as the product
You’ll notice there are no client logos or industry statistics on this page. I’m at the beginning of this practice, and I won’t borrow other firms’ numbers or quote the famous software-failure statistics. Most of those, if you check, were measured on $15M+ enterprise projects and have nothing to do with a build your size. You get the same honesty in the work.
Start here
Let’s talk about your business
I’ll send a short questionnaire ahead of time, we’ll spend 30–45 minutes talking through the process that’s holding you up, and you’ll get a written assessment: what it’s costing you, what the outcome could be, and the realistic options. Free, and useful even if we never work together.