Turning Constraints into Competitive Advantage
The duct tape and bandaid solutions that get you to market—and why you need to replace them before they crush you.
Remember: those who never try bricolage won't get far enough to face scaling problems. But those who never graduate from bricolage won't get much further. The art is knowing when to hold onto your duct tape and when to invest in the real thing.
Entrepreneurial bricolage—a concept I first encountered in Ted Baker's classes at Rutgers—is the art of making something work with whatever you have on hand. It's the duct tape solution, the creative workaround, the "good enough for now" approach that gets you to market when you can't afford the "proper" solution.
Here's the thing: bricolage isn't a competitive advantage you keep forever. It's a go-to-market survival tool. The moment you can afford to fix the duct tape solution—from a skillset or financial perspective—you absolutely should. But those who never try bricolage in the first place? They won't get far enough to face that problem.
The trap is falling in love with your scrappy solutions. That $50/month Airtable "ERP" might get your manufacturing company to $5M in revenue, but try to run a $50M enterprise on it and the technical debt will crush you. Bricolage gets you going, but you must always be wary of the debts you're accruing.
Bricolage isn't about building sustainable competitive advantages—it's about removing barriers to entry so you can test your market assumptions without betting the farm. It's the minimum viable everything that lets you learn whether your business idea has legs.
A small manufacturing startup couldn't afford SAP or even NetSuite, so they built their entire production management system in Airtable connected to QuickBooks via Zapier. Total monthly cost: $50. It was embarrassingly simple by enterprise standards, but it worked.
This "ERP" let them track orders, manage inventory, schedule production, and generate invoices. Was it elegant? No. Did it let them get to market six months faster than if they'd waited to afford "real" software? Absolutely.
Key insight: The best system is the one that exists and works, not the one that's theoretically perfect.
You inherit an old warehouse in the middle of nowhere. The "proper" business plan would be to find tenants or sell it. The bricolage approach? Notice you're in the heart of snack food manufacturing country and offer co-packing services to small brands who can't meet the minimums at larger facilities.
You don't need fancy packaging equipment or certified facilities initially—you start with hand-packing and basic food-safe processes. It's not scalable long-term, but it proves market demand and generates cash flow while you learn the business.
The point: Bricolage gets you into markets you couldn't otherwise afford to test.
The companies that never try bricolage either never start (waiting for perfect conditions) or burn through capital building solutions to problems they don't yet understand. Bricolage forces you to focus on the core value proposition instead of peripheral perfection.
Remember: Bricolage is not about being cheap—it's about being lean. You're conserving resources for the battles that matter while using creativity to handle everything else.
Every bricolage solution comes with hidden costs that compound over time. The workaround that saves you thousands in year one might cost you millions in year five if you don't address it proactively.
That Airtable ERP that got you to $5M? Here's what happens when you try to push it to $15M:
• Performance issues: Load times increase, crashes become frequent
• Data integrity problems: Manual processes introduce errors at scale
• Integration failures: Zapier automations break under heavy load
• Compliance risks: Audit trails become impossible to maintain
• Team frustration: Staff spend more time fighting the system than serving customers
• Solves immediate market entry barrier
• Has clear upgrade path planned
• Generates data to inform better solution
• Cost/benefit clearly positive
• Becomes permanent by default
• No upgrade plan or budget
• Prevents growth instead of enabling it
• Hidden costs exceed obvious benefits
A growing logistics company was managing dispatch with a Google Sheet and WhatsApp group. It worked great for 5 trucks and 20 daily routes. But when they hit 25 trucks and wanted to bid on regulated freight contracts, they hit a wall.
Customers now required real-time tracking, driver hour compliance reporting, and electronic logging integration. The bricolage solution that got them started couldn't scale to meet these requirements.
They had to choose: stay small with their current solution or invest six figures in proper fleet management software to access the bigger contracts. The bricolage debt came due all at once.
The lesson: Always track the true cost of your bricolage solutions, including opportunity costs and future replacement expenses. Budget for the inevitable upgrade from day one.
Not every business function is a good candidate for bricolage. The key is identifying where creative workarounds add value versus where they create unnecessary risk or complexity.
Non-Core Functions:
• Internal project management
• Basic inventory tracking
• Simple reporting dashboards
• Prototype workflows
Low-Risk Areas:
• Marketing automation
• Internal communications
• Performance tracking
• Document management
Customer-Facing Systems:
• E-commerce platforms
• Customer support systems
• Payment processing
• Order tracking portals
Compliance/Security:
• Financial reporting
• Payroll systems
• Data security
• Regulatory documentation
Ask these questions before choosing bricolage:
1. What's the cost of failure? If this breaks, can we recover quickly?
2. What's the upgrade path? How will we replace this when we outgrow it?
3. What are we learning? Does this help us understand our real requirements?
4. What's the opportunity cost? What could we do with the money we're saving?
5. How long is temporary? When specifically will we revisit this decision?
Rule of thumb: Bricolage for learning and iteration, buy for reliability and scale. The moment reliability becomes more important than flexibility, it's time to upgrade.
The most successful companies treat bricolage as a temporary bridge, not a permanent foundation. They use their scrappy solutions to learn what they actually need, then upgrade strategically based on real requirements rather than theoretical best practices.
Stage 1: Pure Bricolage (0-$1M revenue)
Everything is held together with creativity and hope. Focus on proving market demand and achieving product-market fit.
Stage 2: Selective Professionalization ($1M-$5M)
Upgrade customer-facing systems first, keep internal bricolage where it's working. Invest in reliability for revenue-critical functions.
Stage 3: Systematic Replacement ($5M-$15M)
Replace core operational systems with scalable solutions. Keep bricolage only for experimentation and edge cases.
Stage 4: Enterprise Operations ($15M+)
Professional systems for everything mission-critical. Bricolage relegated to innovation labs and new market testing.
• System performance impacts customer experience
• Manual workarounds consume >20% of staff time
• Compliance requirements can't be met
• Error rates increase with volume
• Integration costs exceed replacement costs
• Build requirements from actual usage data
• Migrate gradually, not all at once
• Keep backup systems during transition
• Train teams before going live
• Budget 50% more time than vendors promise
• Replacing systems that still work fine
• Over-engineering for theoretical problems
• Ignoring change management
• Choosing features over reliability
• Underestimating implementation complexity
Remember that manufacturing company with the $50/month Airtable ERP? Here's how they evolved:
Year 1-2: Pure Airtable + Zapier, got them to $3M revenue
Year 3: Upgraded to cloud-based manufacturing software, kept Airtable for R&D tracking
Year 4: Implemented proper ERP, used Airtable only for new product development
Year 5: Full enterprise suite, but still prototype new processes in Airtable before building them properly
Key insight: The best companies never completely abandon bricolage—they just get more selective about when and where they use it.
Even after you've professionalized your core operations, bricolage remains valuable as an innovation tool. The ability to quickly test new ideas with minimal investment becomes your competitive advantage in rapidly changing markets.
Smart companies maintain separate standards for innovation versus operations. Your core business runs on enterprise-grade systems, but your innovation projects still use rapid prototyping and creative workarounds.
Core Business: SAP, Salesforce, proper data warehouses, enterprise security
Innovation Projects: No-code tools, API mashups, manual processes, quick experiments
This lets you move fast on new opportunities while maintaining reliability for existing customers.
Speed to Market
Test ideas in weeks, not quarters
Low-Risk Innovation
Fail fast and cheap
Market Validation
Prove demand before investing
A successful logistics company wanted to test offering warehousing services. Instead of building a warehouse, they partnered with an existing facility and used a simple Google Form for customer requests, managing everything through spreadsheets and email.
Total investment: $500/month. Within 90 days, they had enough demand to justify building their own facility. The bricolage approach let them validate the market without the massive upfront investment.
Once they built the proper facility, they kept the simple intake process—it turned out customers preferred the informal approach over complex online portals.
The insight: Mature companies that maintain their bricolage skills can adapt faster than competitors who've become dependent on formal processes for everything.
The companies that win understand bricolage as a tool, not a philosophy. They use it to get started, learn faster, and stay innovative—but they never let it become a crutch that prevents them from scaling.
Use bricolage to remove barriers to entry and test market assumptions without massive upfront investment.
Replace duct tape solutions before they become liabilities, but only when you understand what you actually need.
Maintain your bricolage skills for rapid prototyping and market testing, even as your core operations professionalize.
Rule of thumb: Bricolage for learning and iteration, buy for reliability and scale. The moment reliability becomes more important than flexibility, it's time to upgrade.
The most successful companies treat bricolage as a temporary bridge, not a permanent foundation. They use their scrappy solutions to learn what they actually need, then upgrade strategically based on real requirements rather than theoretical best practices.
Stage 1: Pure Bricolage (0-$1M revenue)
Everything is held together with creativity and hope. Focus on proving market demand and achieving product-market fit.
Stage 2: Selective Professionalization ($1M-$5M)
Upgrade customer-facing systems first, keep internal bricolage where it's working. Invest in reliability for revenue-critical functions.
Stage 3: Systematic Replacement ($5M-$15M)
Replace core operational systems with scalable solutions. Keep bricolage only for experimentation and edge cases.
Stage 4: Enterprise Operations ($15M+)
Professional systems for everything mission-critical. Bricolage relegated to innovation labs and new market testing.
• System performance impacts customer experience
• Manual workarounds consume >20% of staff time
• Compliance requirements can't be met
• Error rates increase with volume
• Integration costs exceed replacement costs
• Build requirements from actual usage data
• Migrate gradually, not all at once
• Keep backup systems during transition
• Train teams before going live
• Budget 50% more time than vendors promise
• Replacing systems that still work fine
• Over-engineering for theoretical problems
• Ignoring change management
• Choosing features over reliability
• Underestimating implementation complexity
Remember that manufacturing company with the $50/month Airtable ERP? Here's how they evolved:
Year 1-2: Pure Airtable + Zapier, got them to $3M revenue
Year 3: Upgraded to cloud-based manufacturing software, kept Airtable for R&D tracking
Year 4: Implemented proper ERP, used Airtable only for new product development
Year 5: Full enterprise suite, but still prototype new processes in Airtable before building them properly
Key insight: The best companies never completely abandon bricolage—they just get more selective about when and where they use it.
Even after you've professionalized your core operations, bricolage remains valuable as an innovation tool. The ability to quickly test new ideas with minimal investment becomes your competitive advantage in rapidly changing markets.
Smart companies maintain separate standards for innovation versus operations. Your core business runs on enterprise-grade systems, but your innovation projects still use rapid prototyping and creative workarounds.
Core Business: SAP, Salesforce, proper data warehouses, enterprise security
Innovation Projects: No-code tools, API mashups, manual processes, quick experiments
This lets you move fast on new opportunities while maintaining reliability for existing customers.
Speed to Market
Test ideas in weeks, not quarters
Low-Risk Innovation
Fail fast and cheap
Market Validation
Prove demand before investing
A successful logistics company wanted to test offering warehousing services. Instead of building a warehouse, they partnered with an existing facility and used a simple Google Form for customer requests, managing everything through spreadsheets and email.
Total investment: $500/month. Within 90 days, they had enough demand to justify building their own facility. The bricolage approach let them validate the market without the massive upfront investment.
Once they built the proper facility, they kept the simple intake process—it turned out customers preferred the informal approach over complex online portals.
The insight: Mature companies that maintain their bricolage skills can adapt faster than competitors who've become dependent on formal processes for everything.
The companies that win understand bricolage as a tool, not a philosophy. They use it to get started, learn faster, and stay innovative—but they never let it become a crutch that prevents them from scaling.
Use bricolage to remove barriers to entry and test market assumptions without massive upfront investment.
Replace duct tape solutions before they become liabilities, but only when you understand what you actually need.
Maintain your bricolage skills for rapid prototyping and market testing, even as your core operations professionalize.
Whether you're just starting with bricolage solutions or ready to upgrade to enterprise systems, let's map out the right approach for your stage and market. No cookie-cutter advice—just practical solutions for your specific situation.
