In short
Replace the rented tools you use five percent of with software written for you and operated by your agents. Owned. Portable. Getting better every year.
Every company runs on a stack of subscriptions. A CRM that is a contact table with a form. An email tool that is a template that sends. A scheduler, a reporting dashboard, an intake tool. Each one is used for a sliver of what it does, and each sliver is different for every company.
Owning your stack means building the sliver. The five percent you actually use, as software that is yours, documented by your agents and operated by them. It costs less than the rent within a year or two and it never gets more expensive because the vendor decided so.
It also compounds. Rented software gets the features the vendor chooses. Owned software gets rewritten by your agents as your business changes and as the models improve. In three years, a company that started now has almost no rented software left, and every rewrite made it more specifically theirs.
Example
What it looks like.
A CRM for a moving company: customers, quotes, photos, a cubic-foot calculator that reads the photos. Four screens. Nothing the company does not use. Built in the first month, operated by an agent, owned outright.Related
Read next.
- the five percentThe sliver of every rented tool a company actually uses. Everyone uses a different five percent. The rent is for the other ninety-five.Read the definition
- prototypeReal software, small in scope, that a subject-matter expert can run today. Not a mockup, not a slide. The unit of the first month.Read the definition
- portabilityYour agents are files. They move to any harness, any model, any host. Leaving is copying a folder.Read the definition
- Ninety-day transformationA fixed three months, in and out. Build in month one, live by day 30. Adopt in month two. Own in month three, when we hand over the keys, the instructions and the files.Read the definition