We spend a lot of time telling clients to build clean, well-documented data models with a proper warehouse behind them. Then we go home and run our own two-person business off a spreadsheet with more tabs than either of us would like to admit. I think that gap is worth being honest about, because the spreadsheet is not actually a failure. It is proportionate to the size of the decisions we are making.
The spreadsheet, described honestly
It has six tabs. One tracks every project we have quoted, whether we won it, and at what rate. One tracks hours logged against each active project, pulled manually from our time tracker once a week, which is the tab most likely to be a few days stale at any given moment. One is a simple cash flow projection three months out. The other three are smaller: a list of article ideas with a rough priority score, a log of newsletter subscriber counts we update monthly, and a tab neither of us can remember the original purpose of, which we have not deleted out of superstition.
Nothing here would survive a review from any client who hired us to build their data stack. That is the point. The spreadsheet answers exactly the questions two people running a small business need answered, at a frequency that matches how often the underlying numbers actually change.
The decisions this actually informs
Three decisions come up repeatedly, and the spreadsheet handles all of them well enough:
- Should we take on a new client this month? We check the hours tab against our cash flow projection. If we are already near capacity and cash flow is healthy for the next two months, the answer is usually no, and we say so.
- Is our newsletter growing at a rate that matters? The subscriber tab gets a glance once a month. We are not trying to optimize this number aggressively. We mostly want to notice if it starts declining, which would tell us something about the writing, not the marketing.
- Which article should we write next? The idea list gets reordered based on what came up in client conversations that month. This is the least data-driven decision we make, and we are fine with that. Editorial judgment is allowed to just be judgment.
Where we would change our own advice
If either of us hired a third person, or if we started taking on retainer clients with recurring monthly billing instead of project work, the spreadsheet would start to strain. Recurring billing in particular tends to be the point where a proper tool for invoicing and revenue tracking pays for itself, because manual reconciliation errors compound month over month in a way project-based billing does not.
The test we apply to our own tools is the same one we recommend to clients: does the current setup fail in a way that costs real time or money, or does it just look unsophisticated. Only the first one is worth fixing.
The one place we were wrong to wait
To be fair to the case for better tooling, there is one place we waited too long. For nearly two years we tracked which articles led to consulting inquiries by asking new clients directly, "how did you find us," and writing the answer in a notes app. It turns out people misremember this constantly, and the notes were mostly unreliable. Adding a simple, privacy-respecting referrer check on our contact form last year gave us a clearer picture in a week than two years of asking had. Some decisions really do need better data. We just try not to assume that is true by default.