The MakeWaves Blog
Practical reads for founders who run the business AND work the business.
Straight talk on operations, SOPs, reporting, and AI that earns its place. No jargon, no hype, just the systems work that turns treading water into forward momentum.
Your Reorder Points Are a Guess Wearing a Number
The reorder point in your system was probably set years ago by someone who has since left. Three questions that tell you whether your purchasing numbers are decisions or guesses, and why buying forecasting software first makes it worse.
“Field Notes: Bots Found Our Forms in Week One”
Days after our site went live, automated spam started arriving. The principle that shaped our response applies to any small business with a form: filter aggressively, but never let a filter silently delete a real customer.
Your Company Wavelength Beats a Gut Feeling
Founder intuition built the business, but it does not scale, delegate, or survive a bad week. How a weekly Company Wavelength turns gut feel into an operating rhythm.
Your Reports Are Late Because Your Data Is Homeless
If building a report means hunting through inboxes, exports, and six versions of the same spreadsheet, the problem is not reporting. It is that your data has no home.
When Your Best Employee Quits, What Walks Out the Door?
Tribal knowledge is a liability wearing a hero’s uniform. How to measure your key-person risk and turn irreplaceable people into well-supported ones.
When the Founder Is the Bottleneck
Every question routed through you feels like control. It is actually the constraint on your growth. How to move from being the answer key to owning the founder’s sweet spot.
The Tool Owns Your Data. You Just Rent It.
Your customer history, pricing logic, and operational records may be living inside platforms you can leave only by abandoning them. What owning your data actually looks like, and why it decides your AI ceiling.
Your SOPs Are Training Tools, Not Binders
A procedure nobody trains on is a document, not a system. The SOP accountability loop, why real coverage runs 30 to 80+ procedures, and who should own each one.
You Can’t Optimize What You Haven’t Defined
Automation-first fails for a simple reason. The six-step sequence that has to come before any tool, and why skipping it costs more than it saves.
Industry Reads
See all readsThe ERP Payoff Lands After Go-Live, Not At It
Clorox began replacing decades-old supply chain systems in 2021 as part of a five-year digitization program, and its CFO now expects the operational gains, better demand planning, lower inventory, and more automation, to land in the current fiscal year. The company was candid that the cutover disrupted fulfillment before it improved it. The lesson scales down cleanly: a system replacement does not create value at go-live, it creates value once the process around it stabilizes, and that holds whether the budget is $500 million or $50,000.
Three in Four Small Businesses Use AI. One in Seven Has Actually Integrated It.
Goldman Sachs surveyed small business owners and found 76 percent now use AI, with 93 percent reporting a positive impact, yet only 14 percent have fully integrated it into core operations. That gap between trying AI and running on it is the whole story: tools are easy to adopt, but integration requires defined processes and structured data underneath. The 73 percent asking for more training are really asking for a foundation.
Before You Sign That SaaS Contract, Read the Data Return Clause
This guide walks through what to demand in every SaaS agreement before you depend on it: machine-readable export formats, defined data return timelines, and zero fees for retrieving what is yours. It also catalogs the traps, like proprietary export formats that make your own records unreadable anywhere else. This is the data ownership problem in contract form, and the time to negotiate your exit is before you move in.