Stop Looking for a CRM: Here's where to start

Everyone knows what a CRM is, right?
I don’t.

And after five years building operating systems for growing businesses, I can tell you—most business owners don’t either. They just think they’re supposed to.

CRM used to mean something: a process to Manage Relationships with your Customers.

Now? It's shorthand for “pick one of a dozen bloated platforms and hope it magically fixes your workflow.”

Does it send and receive emails?
Generate PDF invoices?
Assign tasks?
Post on social media?
Track calls?
Forecast revenue?
Run drip campaigns?
Use AI?

CRMs today are Frankenstein's monsters—stitched-together features that look great in demos but fall apart in the real world. You feel it when you see the price tag. That nagging doubt: "Is my team really going to use all this?"

You’re right to be skeptical.
You're not the problem. The model is.

"What about HubSpot?"
"Or Zoho? Or Salesforce?"

They're not market leaders because they’re the best fit for you. They’re leaders because they’ve spent hundreds of millions convincing you they are.

They call it “customizable.”
What that really means: buy the software, then pay a team of consultants for six months of meetings, and a system your team still won’t love.

You’re the expert of your business—whether it's architecture, consulting, manufacturing, or sales.
Your job is to deliver value, not manage a software project that never ends.

You don't need more tools, you need better systems to manage the most important thing in your business– its process.

In a former life, I designed mineral‑processing plants—extracting valuable minerals and metals from rocks. The golden rule? Start with the materials you have in hand, not the machine you need.

• Examine its physical and chemical properties.
• Then pick the crusher, grinder, or separator built for exploiting differences in those properties to separate what you want fro what you don't.

Hunting for a CRM first is like buying the separator before you’ve even found the mine—backwards, costly, and guaranteed to stall your operation.

Let’s forget “CRM” for a minute.
Your business has five core functions:

• Marketing & Sales: How you generate leads.
• Communication and Support: How you talk to leads, clients, vendors.
• Business Operations: How you deliver what you promised. It is a big one.
• Project Management: How you improve internally—or manage client projects.
• Finance & Accounting: How you track and move money.

The finance world has some standards: QBO, Xero, Sage.
The rest? Organized chaos.

The key is this:
Know your chaos first.

If your process is slow, expensive, or error-prone, no software will fix it. It’ll just help you mess up faster.

So before you buy anything, map your process.
Pen and paper is fine.
No software needed. No consultant either.

In my next post, I’ll walk you through how to do it—on a single sheet.