The system nobody
can touch,
carried forward.
read in full.
de-risked.
documented.
still yours.
carried forward.
One custom system has run your orders, inventory and invoicing for decades. The developer who built it is gone. We read it, de-risk it, and carry it forward — starting with a fixed-price assessment, not a rebuild you can't yet price.
What we do
Old code, made new.
We don't throw away what works. We read the system nobody can touch and rebuild it, piece by piece, into something documented, tested, and yours.
years of combined work on systems exactly like these
weeks from kickoff to a document you can act on
of code and data in accounts with your name on them
principals on every project, start to finish — no handoffs
01 — The problem
The person who built it is gone.
One trusted developer wrote it. It ran the company for twenty-seven years. Then they retired — and now the business stands on a system nobody can read, nobody can fix, and nobody dares touch.
The packaged-software answer is to abandon it: leave the data, retrain everyone, bend decades of process to fit a roadmap you don't control. That isn't modernization. It's a controlled loss.
Do the arithmetic
What the workarounds cost you.
When the system can't be changed, people patch around it by hand — re-keying orders, double-checking counts, reconciling exports. That labour is the real running cost of a system nobody can touch. Move the sliders to your numbers.
Rough annual cost
Assumes ~7 minutes per manual fix at $42/hour fully loaded. Rough arithmetic, not a promise — the assessment replaces it with your real numbers.
What we fix
Pick the one that keeps you up.
The whole business runs on one retiree's memory.
If the only person who understands the system stops answering the phone, you're not down for a day — you're down until someone re-derives thirty years of decisions from scratch. We turn that memory into documentation, tests, and a maintainable codebase before it walks out the door.
Deliverable: a written systems map, so no single person is the backup.
Nobody trusts the on-hand number.
The system says 47, the shelf says 12, so everyone counts by hand before committing to a customer and purchasing over-orders to be safe. We find the exact points where the record and the shelf diverge — then cost the fix against living with it.
Deliverable: the reconciliation gaps, ranked by what they cost you.
Your pricing lives in undocumented code.
Contract prices, rebates, and the one-off arrangements long relationships accumulate exist only as logic buried in the source — readable by no one currently close to the business. We extract those rules into something you can see, verify, and change.
Deliverable: the business rules, documented and confirmed against reality.
Closing the books means exporting and re-keying.
Because nothing talks to anything, month-end is a person moving data between systems by hand for a week. We map the seams and show where an integration pays for itself in the first quarter.
Deliverable: the integration seams, with a payback estimate for each.
How it runs
Two weeks, three steps.
We stand where the work happens
Order desk, receiving, month-end. The real process, not the documented one.
We read the data, not the demo
What the records say, which rules are real, which are 2004 workarounds.
You get the document
Findings, costed options, a sequenced plan. Yours to take anywhere.
Fit
Who this is for — honestly.
A strong fit
Probably not us
If you're in the second column we'll say so on the first call and point you somewhere genuinely suitable. Filtering honestly is cheaper for both of us than a bad-fit project.
Start with the document, not the pitch.
Twenty minutes, no deck. We'll tell you straight whether an assessment is even the right next step.
A small, steady light that shows up when it gets dark.