How I ended up doing this
I didn't plan on becoming an ERP consultant. I started on the technical side, building and shipping software end to end — which meant learning servers, databases, integrations, and what happens at 2am when something fails quietly and nobody notices until morning.
What changed my direction was watching businesses spend serious money on software nobody ended up using. The software itself usually worked fine. The problem was always earlier: nobody had written down how the business actually ran, nobody was responsible for getting staff to use the new thing, and the whole project had been handed to IT as if it were a purchase rather than a change in how people work.
So I learned the other half properly — operations, buying, how inventory really costs you money, what month-end close involves, and why a warehouse manager keeps his own private register. I kept the technical depth too. That combination is rare, and it's the whole basis of how I work.
Teaching, not just building
Along the way I kept having the same conversations. How do I judge this proposal? Is this quote fair? How do I hold a developer to account when I can't read code? Should we build this or just buy something?
Those questions don't need a consultant. They need someone to teach you how to answer them yourself. So that's what I started doing — sessions with owners, hands-on training for their teams, and staying available for advice afterwards. Over a hundred owners later, this is as big a part of my work as building systems, and honestly the part that lasts longest. A good system helps for five years. An owner who can judge technology decisions is set for the rest of their career.
Bringing businesses together
The third part grew out of the second. Once you've worked with enough small businesses, the waste becomes obvious: sixty independent shops each negotiating alone, each paying full price for software, each rebuilding the same thing from scratch.
Bringing them together fixes that — buying together, sharing one platform, sharing distribution. But it only works if the maths is proven before anyone builds anything, and if the rules are agreed in writing before the first argument. I design, build and run those groups.
What I'm not
I don't sell software licences, so I earn nothing from recommending one product over another. I don't supply developers by the month. And I'm the wrong person if you want someone to agree with a decision you've already made — I'll tell you what I actually think, which is occasionally inconvenient.