The Best Solution Is Sometimes One That Already Exists

There's a certain prestige attached to building things from scratch. Custom code, bespoke architecture, a system designed entirely around your exact requirements. As a developer, there's genuine satisfaction in it. As a consultant, I've learned to be suspicious of it.

The most expensive project I've ever seen wasn't the one with the biggest budget. It was the one where someone built a custom solution to a problem that a $29/month SaaS tool already solved perfectly.

The Muttart moment

In 2020, when COVID-19 lockdowns forced the City of Edmonton's Muttart Conservatory to move its plant shop online overnight, the first instinct was to adapt the existing CRM. It was a capable system — built for managing citizen relationships, not for processing e-commerce transactions. But it was already there, already paid for, and someone made the call to bend it into an online store.

The result went live with no real-time inventory, no automated order management, and staff working overtime every day to manually reconcile purchases against physical stock. Citizens were buying plants that didn't exist. The city was hemorrhaging money not on technology, but on the human labour required to patch what the technology couldn't do.

When I stepped in, I didn't propose a custom build. I proposed Shopify. Two weeks later, the store was live, inventory was tracked in real time, curbside pickup was automated, and the overtime stopped.

The right solution wasn't the most technically impressive one. It was the one that solved the actual problem.

What system integration experience actually gives you

Twenty years of working across enterprise CRMs, municipal platforms, SaaS products, and custom builds teaches you something that no amount of coding skill alone can: pattern recognition.

Most business problems aren't unique. The specific context is unique — your industry, your team, your constraints — but the underlying problem has almost certainly been solved before. Inventory management. Scheduling. Order processing. Customer communication workflows. These are solved problems. There are products built by teams of hundreds specifically to handle them, refined over years of real-world use, and maintained so you don't have to.

A good consultant's job is to know that landscape. To recognize when your problem maps onto an existing solution, and when it genuinely doesn't. And to be honest with you about which is which — even when a custom build would mean more billable hours.

When custom is the right answer

This isn't an argument against custom development. It's an argument for clarity about when it's warranted.

Custom makes sense when the business process is genuinely differentiated and core to your competitive advantage; when no existing tool can be integrated or configured to fit without creating more problems than it solves; when the long-term cost of licensing and vendor dependency outweighs the build-and-maintain cost; or when you need full ownership of the data, the logic, and the roadmap.

The Real Estate Auction Platform (Full Circle) I built for a client in Abu Dhabi is a custom system — because real-time bidding with their specific rules, their specific user flows, and their specific market context had no adequate off-the-shelf equivalent. We evaluated the options. None fit. So we built.

That's the process: evaluate first, build only when necessary.

What this means if you're considering a project

When you work with me, my first commitment isn't to write code. It's to understand your actual problem — the business constraint, the operational pain, the outcome you need — and then find the most efficient path to solving it.

Sometimes that path is a custom Next.js application. Sometimes it's Shopify. Sometimes it's wiring together two existing tools that have never spoken to each other. Sometimes it's telling you that what you think you need built already exists and you should just buy it.

My value isn't in the complexity of what I build. It's in the accuracy of what I recommend.