Tech consultancies solve technical problems. We solve business problems.

Our founder once worked for a company fresh out of receivership. Years of cost-cutting had left them with a decades-old accounting system from a now-defunct vendor. Critical sales data was trapped. You could see every transaction on the screen or you could print them in a fixed report, but that was it. No sales by region or product line. No way to see if an account was up or down.

Our founder's job was to build the necessary reports. But that required him to manually enter three years of transactions into a database, one line at a time. Staring at a foot-high stack of ruled accounting printouts, it occurred to him that the computer had to send instructions to the printer electronically, and those instructions would include all the numbers he was supposed to key.

That evening, after the accounting department went home, he turned off their printer and intercepted a raw print file. Buried in the printer code was the data. He extracted it to Excel, created a quick year-over-year sales report, and left it on his boss's chair.

The next morning, he was called to the CEO's office. Worried that he had forgotten to turn the printer back on, he was surprised to see the sales report in the CEO's hand. The CEO explained that several months before, the company had asked a team of tech consultants to solve the data access problem. The consultants had flown in from Silicon Valley at a cost of $15,000, and after several days, they declared there was no way to export data from the system, but for $80k, they would build one.

They weren't wrong. They just weren't solving the right problem. It wasn't that the company needed a data extraction tool. It needed sales reports. Those are not the same.

At Pathwerks, we don't solve technical problems. We solve business problems with technology.

Uncomplicate it.