I run a software company. What would this look like?
You could build all of this. That is the problem.
The marketing site, the onboarding sequence, the billing chase, the sync between the two systems that do not talk — every one of them is within your ability and none of them is what you are for. So they get done on a Sunday, or by whoever is least busy, or not at all until something breaks in front of a customer.
This is not a capability you are missing. It is a week you are spending on the wrong half of your own company.
There is a tool nobody owns, and everybody uses it.
Somebody wrote it in a fortnight because it was needed in a fortnight. It does something the business now depends on. That person has moved to another team, or left, and the last commit was fourteen months ago.
Nobody wants to touch it, so it does not improve. Nobody will retire it, because something would stop. It is not broken and it is not maintained, and every technology company has three of them.
These are the easiest things in this whole business to hand over, because they are well understood, unloved, and small — and handing one over gets a week back permanently rather than once.
You will ask where it runs. Here is the answer before you ask.
Every account is in your name. Every line of it is yours. It runs on infrastructure you own and pay for directly, and there is no part of it that lives with me — no console you cannot open, no piece that stops working if I do.
You can read all of it. You will, and that is the point: you are the one reader on this site who can actually check, and an answer that only survives not being checked is not an answer.
If you took it in-house tomorrow, nothing would need to be rebuilt to make that possible. It is already the case.
What actually changes, in the order it matters to you.
- If something breaks at 3am it retries itself, and you hear about it in a sentence.
- An order in one place turns up everywhere else it needs to be, without anyone retyping it.
- The follow-up that always gets forgotten, never gets forgotten.
- Money's collected, receipts go out, and nothing gets chased.
- Everything about every customer sits in one place, and it's yours.
- Your prices and photos change when you say so, without waiting on anyone.
- Pages get written for the things people are actually searching for.
- Reports arrive on a Monday without you asking.
- There's one number that tells you whether it's working.
- Only you can open your files. Anyone else asking is refused by the lock itself, not by a rule we wrote.
The audit will tell you what your marketing site is actually doing — which is usually the part of the estate nobody has measured, because everyone has been measuring the product.