Field Guide · No. 01
You can't solve what you can't see.
A field guide to instrumenting your business before you buy another platform, automate another workflow, or sit through another demo.
01 — THE THREE IDEAS, IN ORDER
The walls get more expensive the later you hit them.
The issues you fix are the ones you notice. Most teams populate their problem list from memory, gut feel, and whoever spoke loudest in the last meeting — not from measurement. The waste that isn't visible doesn't get solved.
Every expensive platform promises to replace methodology with features. None of them do. The teams that get the most out of Monday.com are the same teams that would get the most out of Salesforce — the value was never in the platform. It was in knowing what they needed to see.
Clean process unlocks scale. Automation just scales whatever you pointed it at. I've watched this at the $100M level in retail media, where automated reporting pipelines produced a more confident version of the wrong answer every month — because the process underneath had never been cleaned up.
Based on a case study
How I helped a regional cell-tower operator cut more than 10,000 labor hours a year out of their 5G rollout — by measuring the waste, killing the bottlenecks, and moving the slow work off-site.
Read the case study02 — BEFORE THE NEXT DEMO
Run these before the next platform demo. If you can't answer them, the demo is premature.
What decision am I trying to make that I can't make today?
What would I need to see to make it?
What's the smallest, cheapest thing that could show me that?
Nine times out of ten, the answer to the third question is something you already own. Two custom fields on a Monday.com board. A timestamp column in a spreadsheet. Milestone tracking in Asana. The tool isn't the constraint. The method is.
03 — THE FOUR-FIELD TEMPLATE
For any recurring process in your business. Use whatever tracking system you already have.
Run it for two to four weeks. Not forever. Just long enough to get a shape.
04 — AFTER TWO WEEKS
Which step takes the most time? Usually not what your team would have guessed.
Which step has the highest variance? Consistent steps are rarely the problem. Variance is where the waste lives.
What shows up most often in the blocker notes? That's your issues list, already written for you.
05 — BEFORE YOU AUTOMATE
If the answer to any of these is no, automation will make things worse. Automating a messy process doesn't clean it up — it scales the mess, in ways that are harder to see and more expensive to unwind.
Can you describe the process end-to-end without mentioning the tool?
Could a new hire run it correctly from the description alone?
Is the data it produces trustworthy enough to make a decision from?
A note on simpler tools
Simpler tools don't lose functionality. They require you to be more honest about what you actually need from them. That honesty is the whole job.
06 — TWO WEEKS OF REAL DATA
Pick one recurring process — not your biggest problem, your most repeated one. Runs at least 5× a week.
Add the four fields to wherever you already track that work. No new tool.
Tell your team it's temporary — two weeks — and that the data will decide whether to keep it.
Run the process as normal. Capture the fields every time it runs.
At the two-week mark, run the three data questions against what you collected.
Bring the most interesting finding to your next team meeting as a new issue to discuss.
Send me a message and tell me what you're dealing with. One conversation is usually enough to know if I'm the right fit — and if I'm not, I'll usually know someone who is.
or email me directly at contact@corey.consulting