Summary
Growing businesses hit operational breaking points where off-the-shelf software creates more problems than it solves. The five key signs: your team’s bandwidth is stretched thin, you’re paying enterprise prices for features you don’t use, you spend more time pulling data than getting value from it, your client satisfaction is suffering and institutional knowledge is isolated to a few (or one) person. Custom software makes sense when these inefficiencies consistently cost time, money and growth opportunities.
There’s a difference between succeeding because of your software, rather than succeeding in spite of it.
Many growing businesses don’t realize their software is what’s holding them back. That’s because, in many cases, it’s hard to see systemic software issues – everything seems fine at the surface level, especially when you’re hitting your goals. All too often, though, your people and processes are working harder than they need to (and burning through your resources) to get the same results as what could have been achieved much more quickly with custom software supporting them.
These inefficiencies aren’t always blatantly obvious. A sales rep could be closing high-value deals, but be wrestling with a clunky CRM that’s slowing them down, or a project manager might be delivering on a timeline, but tracking all the details in a spreadsheet instead of in their project management system. Even finance directors could be battling these inefficiencies every time they have to pull a quarterly report, only to be forced to reconcile data from a dozen different systems in order to do it. These are all examples of people delivering on expectations, in spite of being held up by current system challenges.
If your company is succeeding right now in spite of these inefficiencies, imagine what you could be accomplishing if you strip all of it away?
Software friction doesn’t announce itself. It builds gradually and businesses adapt. Teams develop workarounds, extra steps become normalized and what started out as minor inefficiencies eventually become systemic issues deeply embedded in daily operations. That’s why it’s important to recognize the signs of your business being ready for a custom solution.
Sign #1: Your Team Has No More Bandwidth
As a business grows and becomes more and more successful, there’s a corresponding demand for more. More clients, more projects and sometimes, more people to support them. However, no business wants to scale their back-office administrative team at a 1:1 ratio alongside their growing book of business. You want to maximize profit margins by keeping your admin team as lean and efficient as possible.
This is a prime example of an opportunity for businesses to scale by switching to a custom software solution: one that helps your team achieve more without requiring additional headcount. Scaling out, not up.
What does scaling out mean?
Scaling out means expanding your operational capacity without proportionally increasing your workforce. Instead of hiring two people to handle double the workload, scaling out focuses on systems and processes that multiply individual productivity. For growing businesses, scaling out becomes essential when revenue growth outpaces the ability to hire and train new staff effectively.
Traditional scaling approaches often mean scaling up – adding more people, more departments, more layers of management. Scaling out takes a different approach: using technology and optimized workflows to handle increased volume with your existing team structure. This approach is particularly crucial for mid-sized businesses where every new hire represents a significant investment in salary, benefits, training and management overhead.
Effective scaling out strategies focus on automation of repetitive tasks, streamlined communication between departments and integrated systems that eliminate manual coordination work. The goal is sustainable growth that doesn’t require your organizational structure to become exponentially more complex as your business expands.
Look for these red flags as signs you’re ready for a custom solution:
- Processes like monthly close-out take days, not hours
- Your team is complaining that they can’t squeeze any more work into their week
- You keep needing to hire additional office staff every time you book a new client
These are all symptoms of a larger issue that’s limiting productivity and preventing efficient scaling out. When your team spends substantial time on manual processes that follow predictable patterns, those are prime candidates for business process efficiency improvements that could resolve operational bottlenecks and improve team productivity through strategic scaling-out approaches.
Sign #2: Out of the Box is Too Much
Most software solutions are designed for the biggest possible market, meaning that their developers want the solution to appeal to as many buyers as possible. While there are some benefits to this approach, it’s almost guaranteed that an average user will end up paying for features they’ll never use.
On the flip side, maybe you’re using the most basic software solution you could find, and finding that it doesn’t do everything you actually need it to do, so you’re paying for additional features, upgrades and third-party plug-ins just to make it do what you need it to.
This is a software trap for many growing businesses: paying enterprise prices and getting enterprise complexity, or experiencing software bloat just to scrape up the bare minimum of what you need. In both instances, you’re missing out on an effective solution that fits the needs of your business model, your market niche and your budget.
Out-of-the-box drawbacks:
- Basic plans that have become inflated with upgraded features
- Using only a small portion of the available functionality while paying for the full package
- Software costs keep climbing as vendors push upgrades
- Third-party plugins, additional APIs or ad-hoc feature requests are necessary
- Features are so generic, you end up having to build custom workarounds anyway
When you factor all of these costs together, the fact is that standard applications often cost more than custom alternatives built for your actual business model in the long run.
Sign #3: You’re Spending More Time Moving Data Than Gaining Value From It
Many businesses spend more time than they realize simply moving information around.
Data gets exported from one system, reformatted and uploaded into another. Reconciliation has to happen between different sources to get a clear picture of revenue or reporting. Project data lives in different systems, which makes status updates a nightmare.
Situations like these create a ripple effect of delays that affect decision-making across your organization.
Signs Your Data is Working Against You
- Financial close takes days because information lives in incompatible systems
- Management reports require manual compilation from multiple sources
- Strategic decisions get made with outdated information because current data isn’t readily available
- Different people maintain their tracking systems
We’ve seen this pattern with growing service businesses where managers couldn’t get unified performance data across their operations. Different departments maintained separate tracking systems for project completion, compliance and customer satisfaction. Quarterly business reviews required substantial manual data compilation from multiple teams, making it impossible to spot trends or respond quickly to market changes.
When you spend more time compiling data than analyzing what it means, your reporting systems are working against business growth instead of supporting it.
Sign #4: Your Systems Are Limiting Your Clients
Many growing businesses find their operational data scattered among Frankenstein-worthy solutions, or else lost in giant enterprise solutions. When a client reaches out with a question, either situation can make it difficult to have an accurate response ready.
The fastest way to lose a client is to be difficult to work with. Even if you have a great customer service team, if your software solution is complicating the process, your clients are going to start looking for another solution.
How System Limitations Become Client Experience Problems
- Slow response times. What should be instant answers become hours-long research projects. Clients notice when competitors can provide immediate responses while you’re still gathering information from different departments.
- Basic questions become complicated. Even simple inquiries like “how much do I owe?” or “what’s my project status?” shouldn’t require any lead time to answer. When account balances live in accounting, project updates sit in separate systems and communication history is scattered across email threads, answering straightforward questions becomes unnecessarily complex.
- Client history gets buried. For any business, customer relationships matter. If your software is burying the details of client history, there’s no way to nurture those relationships effectively. Data like client preferences, project history and communication records should all be centralized, accurate, manageable and accessible at the drop of a hat.
- New features, products or services roll out slowly. Whether you’re offering a product or a service to your customers, they want continuous improvement. Far too often, clients are at the receiving end of promises that don’t come to fruition (or, when they come to market, the product or service isn’t up to par). .
It’s far easier to retain a customer than to win new ones. If your internal software problems are becoming client experience problems, your business will suffer.
Sign #5: Isolated Institutional Knowledge
One of the most dangerous positions to be in as a growing business is to have that one person on your team who knows everything. Sure, on the surface, it’s great. They’re your go-to.
But what happens when your go-to goes on vacation? Has an emergency? What happens if they leave?
In mid-sized businesses, especially who that naturally have smaller teams than some larger counterparts, having a few people on the team with critical institutional knowledge is incredibly common. They might have figured out a way to perform business activities in fast, efficient ways – but it might live in personal spreadsheets, custom formulas and individual expertise that can’t be easily interpreted, shared or scaled.
The Problem With Institutional Knowledge
- Competitive advantages are trapped in individual expertise that can’t be systematized
- Business process documentation that exists in personal files rather than organizational systems
- Key person risk where critical operational knowledge depends on specific people[1]
- Multi-location organizations that can’t capture the processes that create their competitive edge
We’ve worked with service businesses where the most experienced team members had developed superior protocols and quality control methods through years of fieldwork. This expertise lived in their heads and personal notes. When these people trained new hires, knowledge transfer was inconsistent. New team members might learn different procedures, creating quality variations across operations.
When your best processes can’t be captured, improved or scaled because current software can’t accommodate them, growth becomes limited by individual capacity rather than organizational capability.
The Decision Framework: When It’s Time to Build Something Better
While these five signs indicate you need better software solutions, determining whether custom development is the right investment requires evaluating different business factors entirely. Recognizing operational problems is the first step, but strategic readiness determines whether custom software is the right solution for your business right now.
You Have a Unique Use Case
Your business model doesn’t fit standard software assumptions. When your workflows, industry requirements or operational structure differ significantly from typical businesses, custom software often delivers better ROI than adapting to off-the-shelf limitations.
You Want Full Ownership and Control
Custom software gives you total control. No licensing restrictions, no surprise updates, no “sorry, that feature’s not available on your plan.”
Custom is a strong choice when:
- You want to own your IP or tech outright
- You need to control how the product evolves
- You want to build long-term value into your business
You’re Tied to Legacy Tech
You’re running on systems that feel as old as they look. You need an upgrade, but off-the-shelf won’t cut it.
Custom software can help when:
- Your current tech is outdated, unsupported, or built by someone long gone
- You’re patching together legacy systems to keep operations going
- You want to modernize without starting from scratch
You’re Looking for a Competitive Edge
Custom software lets you do things your competitors can’t. You don’t have to follow the same playbook – you can build your own.
Custom gives you an advantage when:
- You want to deliver a standout customer experience
- You’re looking to automate or optimize in ways others can’t
- You’re trying to scale more efficiently and strategically
Is Custom Software Right for Your Business?
The idea of custom software can seem overwhelming. Why build something when it’s easier to just buy something ready-made off the shelf?
Well, for one thing, just because a software is “ready-made” does not make it easier. In fact, complex implementation processes and data migrations are usually made even more difficult when you’re limited by the constraints of a rigid, off-the-shelf product.
Understanding how custom software can outperform off-the-shelf systems can help make your decision even easier.
| Challenge | Why Off-the-Shelf Falls Short | How Custom Software Solves It |
| Unique Workflows | Standard tools force you to adapt your proven processes | Built specifically for your operational requirements |
| Growth Scaling | Generic solutions don’t scale with your specific business model | Designed to grow and evolve with your organization |
| System Integration | Multiple platforms that don’t communicate effectively | Unified system that connects all your operational needs |
| Competitive Advantage | All software customers have access to the same standard offerings | Proprietary capabilities your competitors can’t replicate |
| Process Control | Vendor controls updates, features and pricing | You can drive the capabilities of your software |
National Radon Defense Use of Custom Software: A Real-World Example
Like many businesses, Omaha-based franchise business National Radon Defense was in a position of seeing the signs (and the benefit) of developing custom software to help them manage their multi-location business. With 47 franchisees and growing, they needed more than just business-in-a-box solutions for their work mitigating radon in residential and commercial buildings.
Recognizing the Signs
As NRD’s franchise network expanded nationwide, their existing tools for managing commercial sales and installations began showing serious limitations. They had been using third-party software that created multiple operational bottlenecks.
The system required PC-based installations when field teams needed mobile capabilities. Making changes to fit NRD’s unique sales and installation processes was either impossible or prohibitively expensive. As the franchise network grew, the lack of control over their platform became a barrier to delivering consistent experiences across franchisees.
The Compounding Cost of These Challenges
These issues were slowing down sales processes across all locations. New franchise hires required extensive training time to learn workarounds. Installation teams in the field had to rely on paper instructions and guesswork because the software couldn’t deliver the information they needed effectively.
“Our last system was PC-based, and we wanted mobile software. We wanted to be able to customize it and make changes and not be limited by off-the-shelf functionality,” said Curt Drew, Founder and CEO of NRD.
Volano Software Builds NRD’s Custom Solution
Volano Software built NRD a custom suite of connected applications that addressed their specific franchise needs. The solution included Radon Shield Pro for sales presentations, Sales Point for appointment management, Project Point for installation crews and an Admin Portal for franchise management.
The platform was designed specifically for franchise scalability, allowing NRD to control pricing, update content and manage user access across all franchise locations from a central hub.
The Payoff of Custom Software
The transformation went beyond solving operational inefficiencies—it became a systematic competitive advantage for franchise growth.
Sales consistency and performance improved network-wide as new reps could learn the system in a single day. Installation teams gained access to all necessary information at their fingertips, reducing missed steps and improving quality assurance. The franchise support burden decreased significantly as franchisees received a turnkey system that integrated with existing CRMs.
Most importantly, NRD now owns their platform completely, giving them flexibility to evolve their business model and even explore licensing opportunities to other franchise systems.
All Signs Point to Custom Software
Your business has momentum. You’re hitting targets, serving clients and growing despite software that fights you every step of the way. But growth shouldn’t feel this hard.
Every workaround your team has learned, every manual process they’ve accepted as normal, every hour spent coordinating between systems that should talk to each other is an inefficiency limiting your growth potential.
When National Radon Defense decided to stop accepting the limitations of off-the-shelf software, they built a platform that became central to their competitive advantage. Their franchise network now operates more efficiently, scales more predictably and delivers more consistent customer experiences than competitors still fighting their tools.
That’s what becomes possible when you stop adapting your business to your software and start building software around your business.
Ready to explore what’s possible when your software supports your success, instead of fighting it? Contact our team to talk through what custom software development looks like when it’s designed for growing businesses.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my business is ready for custom software? If you’re experiencing multiple signs from this list — stretched team bandwidth, paying for unused features, spending excessive time on data coordination, client service limitations, or isolated institutional knowledge — custom software likely makes sense. The key is when these inefficiencies consistently cost time, money and growth opportunities.
What types of custom software does Volano build? We build platforms, apps and workflow solutions that match your business’s need for speed and growth. This includes custom mobile apps, web-based admin portals, database solutions, legacy platform modernization and integrations that connect your existing systems.
How much does custom software cost for growing businesses? Custom software costs vary significantly based on complexity and requirements. Most projects for mid-sized businesses represent a substantial investment but typically pay for themselves through operational efficiency gains.
How long does custom software development take? Most projects for growing businesses take several months from concept to deployment. We use an iterative development approach where you start seeing benefits early in the process rather than waiting until everything is complete.
Can custom software integrate with our existing systems? Yes, we build custom solutions that fit your existing workflows, not the other way around. We can connect your various platforms and databases, so information flows automatically instead of requiring manual coordination.
What makes Volano different from other custom software companies? We work with you to build customized software that fits your existing workflows rather than forcing you to adapt to generic solutions. Our team brings expertise in both new technologies and legacy systems, so we can modernize what you have or build something entirely new.
Do you work with legacy systems? Legacy platforms don’t scare us. We have the right skillsets to help support your tech stack, both new and legacy. We can take over maintenance of existing applications and databases or help modernize aging systems.
What industries does Volano work with? We specialize in custom software development for SMBs who have goals that off-the-shelf software can’t support. We work extensively with non-profits and also partner with creative agencies to implement technical solutions for their clients.
