majordome.The Monday before
Two founders in front of the month’s revenue. The CRM gives one amount. The payment tool gives another. The community platform offers a third. None of them is wrong. Each one counts something different: what is signed, what is collected, what is recurring. Before deciding what to do, they first have to agree on what they are talking about.
L’Institut Suisse de Formation trains adults retraining for careers in insurance, certifies them and places them. The commercial relationships live in a CRM, the payments in one tool, the student community in a third, the acquisition in the ad platforms. They wanted a control tower: ask a question about the business and have the answer in thirty seconds.
What it was costing
When three tools give three truths, every meeting starts with a debate about the numbers instead of a debate about the decisions. The acquisition budget is steered on instinct. Meeting tracking depends on fields that nobody fills in. And the founder remains the only person able to reconcile the whole thing, from memory, one evening.
How we worked
The contract is signed on a Tuesday. On the Friday morning, four hours before the kick-off, the intake questionnaire comes back filled in. The kick-off lasts fifty-three minutes, without a single slide. Then five individual thirty-minute interviews with the team, recorded, transcribed, summarised.
Then we go back to the source. Not the numbers I was given: the data itself. Thousands of sales opportunities, every payment since the beginning, six months of meetings, more than four months of call recordings. Pulled again, reconciled, compared. Every gap between two tools is given a name and a cause.
Before the first line of code, a definitions document. For each indicator: the founders’ own wording, quoted word for word, the formula, the source, the known limits, the questions still open. Revenue becomes three numbers that no longer mix: collected, signed, recurring. The document is signed. Only then do we build.
The mission then runs to a fixed rhythm: a weekly call, a written report in four blocks. What was done, what was found, what is blocking, what comes next.
What is running today
The sources are connected: CRM, payments in read access, ad platforms. The definitions base is established and signed. The prototype of the control tower is being built on top of it, with one rule: every number displayed has to be able to say where it comes from and how it is calculated.
The first deliverable is already here, and it is not a screen. It is a shared way of naming and calculating what the company wants to track. Everything else follows from it.
Technical: CRM, payment and advertising connectors, a data model per indicator, a control tower under construction.
What changed, and what remains
The founders now have a shared vocabulary for their numbers, grounded in their own data. The mission is underway: the prototype is being shown to the team, and the move into production follows. This case study will be completed when the system is running.
If this sounds familiar
If your meetings start with a debate about the numbers, the diagnostic starts with the one thing that settles that debate: a written, sourced, signed definition for every number you want to steer by.