The elephant in the room
Why we're called Howdah, and what an old parable has to do with your Monday meeting.
There is an old parable, told in many versions, about a group of people who meet an elephant in the dark. None of them can see it, so each one reaches out and describes the part in front of them.
“It's a snake.”
“It's a tree.”
“It's a fan.”
They argue until morning. No one is lying, and each is right about the part they hold. But every one of them is wrong about the elephant, because no one can see the whole animal.
Trade the dark room for a conference room, and the story hasn't changed.
Every company has this meeting
Ask the head of each department what's holding the business back. You'll get four honest answers, each describing a different animal.
| Who | What they're holding | What they say |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Leads, appointments, close rates | “We need more leads.” |
| Production | Crews, schedules, materials | “We can't install what's been sold.” |
| Office | Paperwork, orders, customer calls | “Nobody fills anything in.” |
| Leadership | Revenue, margin, cash | “Why are we busy and still short?” |
Every answer is true. None of them is the whole business.
The problem isn't disagreement
Getting everyone on the same page doesn't start with agreement. It starts with accepting that each department sees something real, and that none of them sees all of it.
The trouble isn't that sales, production and the office see things differently. It's that they spend the meeting arguing about what's true, when they should be deciding what to do.
What they need is common ground: one set of numbers, from one system, that everyone looks at together. That is the elephant in the room.
One person's signal is another person's static
Sales watches cancels. Production watches lead times. Finance watches margin. To each of them, the other departments' numbers can sound like noise. They aren't. Every one of those numbers is signal for somebody, and the company needs all of them to grow.
Part of our work is sorting it out: which KPIs each role acts on every day, which ones leadership needs to see, and how they connect. Nobody drowns in static, and nothing that matters gets tuned out.
One source of truth, not ten versions of it
In most growing companies, people build their own reports. Each one is shaped, often without anyone meaning to, by the perspective and pressures of the person who built it. Leadership does it too. Ten reports, ten versions of the truth.
A single source changes accountability. The numbers come straight from the system of record, defined once and calculated the same way every time.
The data isn't the opinion of the person accountable for it. They're accountable to it.
Meetings about the data
- Whose spreadsheet is right
- Time spent pulling numbers together before every meeting
- Decisions delayed until someone “double-checks”
Meetings about the issues
- Everyone opens the same dashboard
- Time spent on causes, owners and next steps
- Decisions made in the room, on the facts
Alignment is what lets you scale
Every company outgrows the way it started. What worked with one market and a few crews starts to strain with several markets, a sales floor and a production schedule to keep. Companies that scale well align their departments on the same numbers first. The ones that don't lose operating time just getting the data together, and stall in confusion.
Data is powerful, like an elephant. Handled well, it gets you to the truth faster and more reliably, so growth takes hold without setbacks.
Handled carelessly, at any level of the company, it can carry you the wrong way just as fast. That's why we define every number once, from one source, the same for everyone from the field to the owner.
So we built the seat up top
A howdah is the seat on an elephant's back. From up there you can see the whole animal, and where it's heading. That is what we build for remodelers and builders: a view from the top, with every part in sight.
One backbone
Your CRM holds the jobs, the money and the schedule, entered the same way by everyone.
One view from the top
A dashboard leadership and every department open in the same meeting, looking at the same numbers.
Drill down to your part
Sales drills into reps, production into crews, the office into jobs. Each part, seen as part of the whole.
Let's look at your whole elephant.
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