You Can't Train a Donkey to be a Horse

A couple years ago, I was conversing with a manager of mine named Mo.  Mo was managing my first business, Munchy'z.  Munchy'z is a sandwich shop located on the WSU college campus that I owned and managed throughout college.  Mo was complaining about how he could not get one of the other employees to play a leadership role even though he had spent an excessive amount of time training him.  I replied to him and said, "You can't train a donkey to be a horse."  I meant no offense to the employee we were talking about.  This person was a great employee whom handled his responsibilities perfectly.  However, he could not be trained to be a supervisor due to his lack of leadership skills. This phrase stuck in my head and made me look at things differently.

During my time managing a wholesale and distribution business, we decided to use Quickbooks as our ERP solution.  My partner at the time had invested in Quickbooks as the primary purchase and sales software.  Since he had invested money and time into the software we decided to make it work as our ERP solution.  We had one hell of a time doing this.  In my opinion, the project was a failure.

A donkey is a great animal which is used for many things such as carrying goods, a source of transportation, and maybe even a pet.  The donkey can carry 20-30% of its body weight and can be used as a farming or dairy animal.  The fact is that it may look like a horse, but it can not do the things a horse can do or at least not nearly as well -- if it walks like a horse and sounds like a horse; it still may be a donkey.  If you ever find yourself in need of a racehorse, you need to train a horse, not a donkey.  In hindsight, I wish we had gone with a "horse" like SAP Business One.

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In trying to implement Quickbooks, we had to get creative.  We were able to adapt functions which were intended for something else to become functions we needed to run our wholesale and distribution business.  We had to combine Excel and other software which created double data entry into our "ERP software."

In addition, our accounting was a mess.  We could not get accurate inventory data to transfer from Quickbooks POS to Quickbooks PRO (our accounting software).  You would assume that Quickbooks products would transfer data between each other accurately.  We ended up generating multiple reports from Quickbooks POS, Quickbooks PRO and our payroll provider in order to try to formulate accurate performance reports.  The Quickbooks POS integration to Quickbooks PRO transferred individual transactions, so the amount of time it would take to expense each transaction in Quickbooks PRO was tedious.  Thus, monthly inventory reports from Quickbooks POS were adjusted in our Quickbooks PRO accounting software.  Purchase orders had to be done from an inventory level from our Quickbooks POS software due to inventory assignments and then expensed appropriately in Quickbooks PRO.

Those are just a couple of the obstacles that we had to deal with.  Our end of the month reports consisted of multiple pages from multiple software sources.  Profit and Loss statements were estimated due to the lag in payroll, unpaid inventory, unprocessed sales orders and time spent consolidating multiple reports.  The "ERP Solution" we had was more like an ERP problem.

"You can't train a donkey to be a horse."