Thinking on GTM, brand, and commercial architecture.

There's a moment every operator knows. You open the file. It's loading. You wait. The fan spins up. And you think: is today the day it doesn't open?

It always opens. That's the problem.

I spent years managing portfolio data, reporting cycles, and operational workflows in Excel. Not because it was the right tool — because it was the tool that was already there, everyone knew how to open it, and nobody wanted to have the conversation about replacing it.

That conversation, it turns out, was worth having.

Excel isn't the villain. Staying in it is.

Excel is genuinely good at what it was built for: calculations, quick analysis, one-off models. Where it breaks down is when it becomes the operating system for a growing business. When the file gets passed between people. When someone adds a tab. When the logic that was clear to the person who built it in 2021 is completely opaque to everyone else in 2024.

The symptoms are recognisable. Reporting takes three days because someone has to manually consolidate five files. Numbers don't match between departments because each team maintains their own version. A new hire joins and spends their first two weeks reverse-engineering a VLOOKUP written by someone who left in February. You know it's fragile. You keep meaning to fix it. You don't.

Meanwhile, decisions are being made on data that may or may not be correct, and nobody is quite sure.

The real cost isn't the hours. It's the decisioIt's easy to calculate the time cost of manual reporting — hours per cycle, multiplied by headcount, multiplied by frequency. The number is always bigger than expected and it makes a compelling slide.

But that's not actually the expensive part.

The expensive part is the decisions that get made on stale data, on incomplete data, or on data that one person assembled at speed under pressure at the end of the quarter. The expensive part is the LP meeting where you can't answer a question because the answer lives in a tab nobody has looked at in six months. The expensive part is the growth opportunity you moved on slowly because the picture wasn't clear enough to move fast.

Excel doesn't make you slow because it's slow. It makes you slow because it puts the burden of data integrity on people instead of systems.

What actually changes when you fix it

I've been on both sides of this. Building the operational infrastructure for a scaling company — and advising companies on how to do the same.

The shift isn't dramatic. There's no single moment where everything clicks. What changes is the baseline. Reporting that took three days takes three hours. Questions that required a meeting to answer get answered in a dashboard check. New hires onboard to a system instead of to an individual's habits.

More importantly: the commercial decisions improve. Not because the data is prettier, but because it's trustworthy. You can act on it without the internal caveat of "assuming the numbers are right."

The question isn't whether to move on from Excel. It's when.

There's a common pattern I see across B2B SaaS and VC-backed companies: Excel works fine until it doesn't, and by the time it doesn't, the cost of fixing it is significant. The data is fragmented across files and people. The logic is undocumented. The migration project keeps getting deprioritised in favour of things that feel more urgent.

The right time to build proper operational infrastructure is before the pain becomes acute. The second-best time is now.

If you're still running your portfolio, your pipeline, or your reporting in spreadsheets — not because they're the right tool, but because nobody has made the case for changing — that case is worth making. The conversation is usually shorter than people expect.