Business Analysis & Scaling

I’m thinking about business analysis and scaling businesses for a meeting.

On the one hand, you don’t want to build The Titanic for a little weekend fishing trip. On the other hand, you don’t want to go out in a row boat only to learn the sea is too rough; you’d end up in deep water…

It’s rare for businesses to over commit resources but it can happen. The most common over commitment is the little website or tech startup that wants robust servers to handle 100,000,000 unique visitors every day. Let’s be honest, at the start you simply will not have that much traffic and you’re spending too much time and money on a problem that doesn’t exist yet.

For established businesses, especially consumer products & services, it’s more common to go out in a row boat and drown (or come close).

Think of a retail store that hires temporary staff every holiday season. Those temporary workers come at a higher price than regular staff. It might cost time to train them, they might make more errors that cost money, or you may have to pay them extra since a temporarily worker doesn’t have a sustainable income. Imagine instead if that retailer could add online sales so the increased holiday load is smaller since increased fulfillment/shipping is easier to account for than increased foot traffic. Or, imagine the small retailer ran off-season sales to even out annual demand. Or, imagine that small retailer implements self serve options, self-checkout, and other automated tools.

All of those options allow the business to scale flexibly without costs scaling disproportionately to income. I.E. the last thing you want is a 110% increase in costs for every 100% increas in income. After 900% growth the business will end up losing money.

Here’s the thing, it’s really easy to see the fish biting and go out in a small row boat. The knee jerk reaction to respond immediately to good news, like increased income, prevents human nature from pausing and thinking about the best, most-sustainable solutions.

I’ve recently determined I’m in a great intersection of business and technology/automation. I’m able to ask “what’s the problem”, “what’s the root cause”, “what’s the current solution”, and “can tech do better”. If you find yourself saying “that’s the way we’ve always done it” or “that’s how our competitors do it” some introspection might be valuable.

I love helping people and I love solving problems. If you think you have a scalability challenge I’m happy to bounce ideas around.

Voting Software Solutions

  • https://www.scytl.com/online-voting/invote/
  • https://option.vote/
  • https://votosocial.github.io/
  • https://www.goodfirms.co/blog/best-free-open-source-voting-software-solutions
  • https://medevel.com/11-open-source-voting-system/
  • https://vote.heliosvoting.org/
  • https://electionrunner.com/

Principles & What it Is/Isn’t

This is a living document where we can collaborate on the guiding principles of the non-profit and what it is and is-not.

Guiding Principles:

  • A person can be banned for life given repeated violations of the terms of service.
    • To be banned there must be 100% agreement of the non-profit board of directors. Or, more than 55% of all users must agree on the ban.
  • There will be an annual election of the board of directors and the executive director.
  • The executive director is the moderator and can delegate the moderation to others they see fit.
  • Any moderation decision made can be appealed to the board of directors.
    • Moderation decisions can be overturned by more than 55% of the board of directors.

What it is:

  • Moderated
  • A community project.
    • I’m driving this because I have a tech background and I really dislike the direction for-profit social networks have gone.
    • Being a community, non-profit project I admit I don’t know everything. I need your help. I need you to comment below, fill out surveys, and provide input. The community needs to steer the direction that the community wants its social network to go.

what it is not:

  • A place for hate-speach.
  • A place to organize any protest, social disruption, vandalism, crime, etc.
  • A place to engage companies, organizations, etc.
    • To be perfectly honest this non-profit is going to be small & hyper-local. It’s false to believe companies will create accounts or monitor every little network that pops up.That can/should be a place for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. But it should also be a conscious choice of “I want to engage the world” or “I want to engage my friends and family”.

Use the comments below to add what you think it should or should not be. We will then integrate all data into a voting platform for open, transparent agreement on purpose.

Non-Profit Social Timeline/Roadmap/Plan

  1. https://amorphousprojects.com/category/non-profit-social/Create a survey to gather user feedback, set priorities, and determine next steps. Link to the survey is here: 
  2. We are here – 2022-04-15
  3. Write a “manifesto” to set the overall direction, mission, vision, values, etc.
    1. This is “don’t be evil” of Google. A founding principle that, in our case, will never be forgotten or removed.
  4. Find an open source voting platform (or build one).
    1. This is early in the process because votes are going to be required almost from the get-go to set the priorities and direction of the org.
    2. This needs to be installed on a server we own/operate to control the data and to integrate with an owned user-auth service.
    3. We also want to provide transparency in votes for/against any given item.
  5. Gather/publish survey responses.
    1. The survey responses will form the next steps of the road map.
    2. The survey and follow-ups will identify the first software/components necessary to meet requirements.
    3. The survey will define the MVP.

Senior Underwriting Analyst – Cansure Insurance

Feb 2016 to Jul 2018

  • A newly created role designed to streamline audit & compliance processes and build management information systems.
  • Built a standardized audit template resulting in faster audit responses and less need for discussion around audit response.
  • Audit response time decreased from 18+ months to 2 months.
  • Received praise from Lloyd’s markets and audit staff on the efficiency of the system, usability, and comprehensiveness.
  • Built, operated, and maintained a data lake on 2 distributed servers within the office network.
  • The data lake was able to import 1,800,000+ rows from 4,200+ Excel spreadsheets in less than 24 hours.
  • Brought the data from ~24,000 claims in ~2,000 spreadsheets into the data lake and built a tool for searching claims. Underwriters used this tool for renewals rather than discussing each renewal and each claim with the claims staff.
  • Built reports combining all spreadsheets of underwriting and claims data. These reports were used in Lloyd’s contract negotiations to show immediate impact of management decisions.
  • Built an online insurance quote tool in 2 months that worked within Lloyds’ requirements for human review of policies prior to binding. The tool was so efficient and easy to use it was preferred by internal underwriting staff as well.
  • Built an web app for policy renewals in 4 months that was integrated in an associations website for the members’ use. Within specified criteria association members could fill out renewal details, obtain a quote, issue a policy, and pay by credit card.

Co-Founder – Lakebed.io

Jan 2018 to Present

I built a data lake for Cansure. At the same time I was volunteering for the City of New Westminster on their Open Data. The City of New West expressed frustration about the number of disparate data sources (taxes, business licenses, dog licenses, building permits, etc, etc, etc). They also expressed frustration that it takes a day or more to “anonymize” data before making it openly available. The Open Data files are then hosted as flat, text files on their website server.

The challenges New West staff expressed sounded awfully similar to the challenges Cansure expressed, and before that Optimum Insurance. I believe all businesses need to pull together disparate data, make it easily accessible, query via APIs, and manage permissions/security.

So, I built Lakebed!

Senior Software Engineer – ITS Consulting

Aug 2020 to Present

  • Reviewed client legacy code and developed an agile project plan/estimate for upgrade, bug fixes, documentation, and maintenance. Successfully continue delivering on that upgrade plan.
  • The legacy application is so old/out-dated it still uses HTML tables and jQuery AJAX calls. The plan is to slowly upgrade the entire app to modern API’s, microservices, and React front-end component.
  • Senior front-end (React/Bootstrap) and back-end (PHP, SQL, Bash) developer.
  • Built an AR app for a startup R&D project.
  • Built an AWS S3 file storage integration with WordPress for a religious organization.
  • Built an internal dashboard for managing information security event notifications.