Most Shops Don’t Switch ERPs. They Outgrow a Spreadsheet.
Nobody sold you the system you run on now. Somebody in your shop built it.
It usually starts as one workbook. An estimator wants a faster way to price a job, or a PM gets tired of walking out to the floor for a status update. It works, so it grows. Now there is a tab for labor rates, a Google Sheet the field updates from their phones, a whiteboard that is the actual production schedule, and a folder of saved emails doing the job of an RFI log. Every piece of that solved a real problem the day it got built.
Most software companies get this wrong about millwork. The alternative to an ERP is almost never somebody else’s ERP. It is the thing your own people made.
It does not break. It stops keeping up.
An estimator emails an RFI and the answer lands in their inbox, so a month later the PM asks the same question again. Cut lists get rebuilt from scratch per job. Installers write percent complete on paper and turn it in at day’s end, so the earliest a PM can respond is tomorrow morning. You find out late, then rearrange the month around it. That is not a discipline problem. It is what happens when people carry the information instead of a system.
Ask who else can actually run it
The person who built your pricing workbook understands the logic inside it. Who else does? Not the formulas, the reasoning. Why that waste factor, why that markup on that GC, why the tab nobody touches is still there.
If the answer is one name, that name cannot take a real vacation and cannot be promoted out of the job. Quitting would be worse. You never hired a software maintainer, and you have one anyway. Never be too good at the job you do not want.
Schlaegle Design Build ran on spreadsheets until they became a blocker
Casey Schlaegle started Schlaegle Design Build Associates in his Pittsburgh basement on April Fool’s Day in 2011, on $30,000 of revenue and whatever work he could get, from countertops to construction.
“I didn’t know how accounting worked, so learning QuickBooks was a crash course.”
The business kept growing. By 2018 it ran on Excel and QuickBooks, and scaling got harder every year. That got concrete during COVID, when Casey took over purchasing himself for a stretch and saw what a paper system costs from the inside. He came across INNERGY through his peer group in 2021, and he was skeptical at first.
Today it is roughly 45 employees and about $10 million, with work at Carnegie Mellon, PNC Park, and Nemacolin. Two things changed, and neither one is a software feature. Workload meetings went from hours to 45 minutes. And the number he manages by moved from revenue volume to contribution margin per hour, which is what put the shop in high-profit territory. He builds his own dashboards on top now through API calls, but the order matters: standardize the data first, automate second.
Mission Bell started in exactly the same place
Mission Bell has been around since 1959. Jason Neff joined in 1998 and is now COO of roughly 250 people in the Bay Area. Where did a company that size begin? Lotus 1-2-3. Then Excel. Then an internal database of their own that handled rudimentary scheduling and stayed, in his words, very disconnected from the rest of the organization.
Same road as the basement in Pittsburgh, started half a century earlier. They got further down it than most shops ever will, and then they ran the math on finishing.
“We were evaluating the cost of maintaining the system, the cost of hosting the system, the cost of ensuring redundancy and connectivity and uptime. And an extremely long list of features and functionality that we needed to get coded into the system. It would have probably taken us two years, if not more.”
Most millworkers are in the same boat, he figures. They are not software developers and they do not have software developers on the team. Two years or more to finish building what they had started. They signed with INNERGY two months after the first conversation, and went live four months after that.
We bring that timeline up because implementation is the objection we hear most, usually some version of not being able to afford the disruption. One detail explains how Mission Bell moved that fast. They did not rebuild the old system inside the new one. Rather than mimic what they had, they changed their standard work toward the best practice path, which is the opposite of what most shops ask for on day one.
Forecaster and the Bottleneck Report now show them what is coming and where the holes are, far enough out to expand into life sciences and plan the team for it.
Two signals it is time
Casey’s test is the shorter one. Enter the same data more than twice and it is time to look at an ERP. Jason’s takes longer to say: once the shop needs a dedicated estimator, dedicated project management, and dedicated engineering, you have built barriers information has to cross.
Neither test mentions revenue. Both are about handoffs.
Your homegrown system is not the villain here. Somebody smart built it under pressure, and it carried the shop further than anyone expected it to. The question is whether it can carry the shop you are trying to become, and whether the person maintaining it should still have that job.
Casey has advice for anyone sitting where he sat in 2018.
“Do it sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more you’ll wish you had started earlier.”
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