You didn't get a forestry degree to spend Sunday nights reconciling expenses in QuickBooks or chasing foremen for updates via group texts. You got into this because you value the land, the legacy, and the work.

But right now, your "back office" is a liability.

The Invisible Cost of "Good Enough" Most consulting foresters are running "Willy Nilly" operations (yes, that's what folks have told me). You use a mix of manila folders, Excel sheets, and a "dry erase board" that holds the entire company's schedule.

Here is what that is actually costing you:

• Leakage: You forget to invoice for that extra half-day or the transitional miles between tracts.

  
  

• Blind Bidding: You are estimating the next project based on "gut feeling" rather than actual margins from the last one. If you don't know your true cost, you're gambling your and your business' future.

  
  

• The Ceiling: If all the project knowledge is "locked up in your brain," you can never scale. You can’t take a vacation, and you certainly can’t hand the business over to the next generation because the "system" lives and dies with you.

The problem isn't that you're lazy or not working hard enough, the problem lies in spread out and generic tools that do different things, wasting your time double entering data and never getting that real-time view of financials or project statuses.