Nothing screams scale like 47 tools and zero instrumentation.

Every portfolio company has the same modern uniform.

HubSpot. Salesforce. Segment. A CDP. Call tracking. A BI tool. A “warehouse”. A dashboard someone screenshares once a month.

None of it talks to each other.

So you end up with a tech stack spreadsheet that looks like progress and behaves like a fog machine. Lead counts never match. CAC is a religious argument. The CFO asks for a number and gets a vibe.

And yes, it’s normal now. The average company runs north of 100 SaaS apps, and the martech landscape is over 15,000 products. Tool sprawl isn’t a bug, it’s the default.

Why it happens is painfully simple. Buying tools is easier than making decisions.

It’s easier to approve another contract than pick a source of truth. Easier to add “analytics” than define what a lead is. Easier to let every function choose their favourite toy than tell one adult they own the plumbing.

Home services is where this gets expensive fast.

Calls get tracked in one place, bookings in another, refunds somewhere else, and marketing reports in a Google Sheet that only works for the person who built it. Meanwhile the call centre is optimising to hit “answer rate” and marketing is celebrating CPL while revenue quietly taps out.

Fixing it is boring, which is why it works.

Fewer tools. One source of truth. One owner for data plumbing with the authority to say no. If nobody owns the joins, the business is just a collection of subscriptions.