Guest Post from a client with deep experience in seafood. He asked to remain nameless to protect the innocent.
I've been around the seafood business long enough to remember when inventory was tracked on clipboards, prices were written on legal pads, and the fax machine was considered cutting-edge technology.
And to be honest, a lot of us did pretty well that way.
The seafood industry has always been built by hardworking people who figure things out as they go. You start with one customer, then ten. One truck, then five. One spreadsheet, then twenty.
That's usually how it happens.
Nobody wakes up one morning and says, "I'm going to build a business that runs on 47 different spreadsheets."
It just grows that way over time.
A tab gets added for inventory. Another for purchasing. Another for production yields. Somebody builds a pricing spreadsheet. Then someone else builds their own version because they don't trust the first one.
Before you know it, you've got half the company spending part of their day updating spreadsheets, checking spreadsheets, fixing spreadsheets, or trying to figure out which spreadsheet is actually correct.
The funny thing is, most companies don't realize how much it's costing them because the system sort of works.
Until it doesn't.
A few years back, I heard about a situation that should make every seafood operator cringe.
A company sold 1,000 pounds of 10-50 halibut at $12 a pound. Simple order. Nothing unusual.
Somewhere along the way, somebody made a mistake in a spreadsheet. Maybe a formula got overwritten. Maybe a cell got copied incorrectly. Nobody knows exactly how it happened.
What they do know is that the price got changed to zero.
Not discounted.
Not reduced.
Zero.
The order was released. The product shipped. Nobody caught it.
The only reason that company didn't lose $12,000 worth of fish was because the customer on the receiving end was honest enough to pick up the phone and tell them something looked wrong.
Think about that for a second.
The safeguard wasn't a system.
The safeguard wasn't a process.
The safeguard was a customer doing the right thing.
Now ask yourself another question.
How many mistakes happen that nobody catches?
That's the part that keeps me up at night.
Most companies only find the errors they stumble across. The inventory shortage. The pricing mistake. The customer complaint.
But what about the stuff that quietly slips through?
The yield calculation that's off by a point or two.
The inventory count that's wrong.
The lot code entered incorrectly.
The purchase order based on outdated information.
The margin that slowly leaks out of the business one small mistake at a time.
Those things don't usually show up with flashing lights and sirens. They just chip away at profitability month after month.
The other problem with spreadsheet-driven businesses is that they tend to depend on one or two people who know how everything works.
Every company has that person.
You know exactly who I'm talking about.
The person who built the spreadsheet ten years ago.
The person who knows which tabs matter and which formulas can't be touched.
The person everyone calls when a number doesn't look right.
That's not a system.
That's a dependency.
And if that person retires, gets sick, or decides to take a job somewhere else, you've suddenly got a major problem on your hands.
I've also seen this come up when owners start thinking about selling their businesses.
A lot of folks spend decades building a successful company and assume buyers will only look at revenue and profit.
They don't.
They look at risk.
They look at processes.
They look at whether the business can keep running without the owner or the handful of people who hold everything together.
When a buyer sees a company running on dozens of spreadsheets maintained by a few key employees, they see operational risk.
When they see a business running on a structured platform with traceability, inventory, production, purchasing, and sales all connected together, they see something else.
They see a business that's built to scale.
That's why I tell people to stop looking at software as a monthly expense.
That's the wrong way to think about it.
Nobody ever questions buying a forklift because they understand what the forklift does. It saves labor. It improves efficiency. It helps move product faster.
Operational software is no different.
The challenge is that it's hard to calculate the cost of mistakes you don't know you're making.
It's easy to see a software invoice.
It's much harder to see the inventory discrepancies, pricing errors, wasted labor hours, and missed opportunities that happen every day behind the scenes.
The truth is, most seafood companies outgrow spreadsheets long before they realize it.
And that's okay.
The spreadsheet probably helped build the business.
It served its purpose.
But the systems that get you to $10 million aren't always the systems that get you to $50 million.
At some point, every growing seafood company has to decide whether they want to keep managing the business through spreadsheets or start managing it through information they can trust.
Because in this business, margins are tight, mistakes are expensive, and hoping somebody catches the next $12,000 error isn't much of a strategy.
