Council Post: The Best Software For Your Business Fits How You Already Work
Revv CEO Adi Bathla is transforming auto repair with AI-powered tools for ADAS calibration, diagnostics and shop efficiency.gettyThere are too many platforms that don't want to help you run your business. Inst...
Revv CEO Adi Bathla is transforming auto repair with AI-powered tools for ADAS calibration, diagnostics and shop efficiency.
getty
There are too many platforms that don't want to help you run your business. Instead, they want to tell you how your business runs now.
One area I’ve encountered this over the years was in HR-related software.
You go looking for a tool to make hiring easier, and you walk away with a system that has strong opinions: This is how many interview rounds you'll run, this is what a "stage" is in your hiring process, this is the shape your process has to take from here on.
Sure, you can adjust some of these things, but oftentimes, instead of buying a tool, you’ve ended up inheriting a worldview.
The Expensive Part Shows Up After You Sign
The number on the invoice is the cheapest part of that decision. The cost that hurts shows up later, in the behavior you have to change to make the thing work. Your team stops doing what worked and starts feeding the software what it wants.
Before you know it, you’re bending your own roles to fit the vendor's labels. Adoption turns into a fight because you're asking good people to abandon a process that was fine to satisfy a new tool. Stack a few of those together, and you've quietly rebuilt your company around other people's assumptions.
This is what makes shadow IT a real problem. Your teams are looking for the quickest, most efficient way to do things. If they’ve found a faster way to get the same result, you’ve identified two problems at once: the platform and the process.
How To Build Platforms That Avoid This Problem
It’s obvious I’m wary of this pitfall and went so far as to build Revv the complete opposite way. From day zero, “customer holds the key” was a core value.
We have a live Slack channel running with every nugget from every sales call and every shop conversation, a constant feed of what the customer was asking for, again and again, and we'd find the repeatable patterns, run a quick impact-versus-effort read and ship against it that same week.
Every button click in the product carries the voice of the customer.
When you build that way, I’ve found it hard to stomach software that walks in and dictates how the customer should operate instead.
You Know Your Business Better Than Any Vendor
No platform should define how you work. After all, running a company is a lot like raising a child. You know it inside and out: what it needs, where it's fragile, what makes it different from the company/child down the street.
A vendor doesn't know that. You do.
So I've gotten ruthless about one question before adopting anything: Does this fit how we already work, or does it require us to work differently just to use it? If the honest answer is "we'd have to change our operations to adopt this," that's a flag worth sitting with.
Sometimes the change is worth making. Often, it's a vendor solving their design problem at your expense.
I'm also suspicious of stacks that keep growing. There’s a quote from the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that goes: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
He was describing aircraft. It's the right test for a tech stack too. The strongest setups I've seen keep the tool count low. Every tool earns its place, and you can still explain in one breath what each one does and why.
Where Standardization Earns Its Keep
I want to be careful, because the opposite mistake is just as real. Some standardization is exactly what you need as you grow.
In the collision space, when you're running multiple locations and multiple teams, consistency is what keeps quality from drifting, and the right systems layer enforces it without the owner having to be everywhere at once.
The distinction I'd draw is between software that enforces consistency and software that dictates behavior. Good tools make the right way the easy way without telling you how to run your shop. The wrong ones decide that for you and call it best practice.
A tool should take the friction out of how you already operate at your best, then help you repeat it everywhere. That is a very different thing from a tool that hands you a new operating manual on day one.
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