Formulate

Wonderful to see Alan Hickman yesterday, along with my marvellous colleagues Stephen Miller, Thibault Bertin and Jack Loizel, and compliment one another on the amazing jointly developed IRL Hub platform, which is giving Innovative Risk London a leading edge over its competitors. Alan and I, who both (oh god) turn 50 next year, are pushing aside any old-fashioned thinking and charging ahead with AI adoption, with my favourite LLM being #Claude and his #Grok. I’m thrilled to be working in partnership with Alan to leverage AI and enable IRL’s continued successful scaling without huge staffing costs.

I genuinely believe the days of using spreadsheets as business systems are numbered. Spreadsheets will always have their place, but there's no real reason to keep storing business application logic inside them when platforms like Airtable and Microsoft Power Platform exist. 📊 In many cases, you can simply import your spreadsheets into a low-code or no-code platform and do far more with them. For larger organisations, spreadsheets can also create compliance challenges. You've got security to think about, you've got permissions to manage. And because spreadsheets are so easy to change, small changes can sometimes have consequences that aren't realised until much later. That's why I recommend taking a gradual approach. Start with your simplest spreadsheet. Move it into a low-code or no-code system. Then do the next one. 🔗 As you begin connecting those systems together, you bring more of your business data into one place. Once you've done that, tools like Airtable Omni and Microsoft Copilot become much more powerful because you can start asking meaningful questions about your data. 🔒 Modernising doesn't have to happen all at once. Start with one spreadsheet, build from there and let your systems evolve over time.

Can you build an Airtable system quickly and make it harder to scale later? In my experience, yes. Airtable is a brilliant tool because teams can shape systems around how the business actually works. The risk is that the early build can feel deceptively simple. A few tables, views and automations solve the immediate problem, so the system feels finished. Then the business grows. More people start using it, more requirements appear and the structure that worked at the start begins to feel restrictive. 💡 That is why we focus on the foundation first. Before building too much on top, it is worth getting the core pieces right: 🔹 Tables that reflect the business properly 🔹 Relationships that can support change 🔹 Automations that make the process easier to manage 🔹 A system the business can understand and maintain When those pieces are in place, new requirements are easier to handle without rebuilding from scratch. The best Airtable systems work for the business today and still have room to grow with it. ⬇️ Want to build Airtable systems that are easier to scale? Download our free guide below. https://lnkd.in/ey-s3TSU

Airtable systems become fragile when too much of how they work is carried by one person. I’ve seen systems that look perfectly fine from the outside. The automations run, the reports get produced and the team knows how to get through the day. But when a process changes, a new person joins or something needs to be improved, the weakness becomes obvious. The business has to go back to the person who remembers why everything was built that way. That dependency creates risk. One reason I like Airtable is that, when it is built properly, it gives the business more visibility into how the system works. The structure is there to see, the logic is easier to follow and any code sits within the system rather than being hidden away somewhere only one person understands. Over time, fragile systems start affecting more than the workflow itself. 🔹 People feel blocked because they cannot change things confidently 🔹 Growth becomes harder because every improvement depends on one person 🔹 Handover becomes risky because the knowledge has never really left someone’s head Sometimes, holding onto a system can feel like protecting a role. But if the company cannot understand the system without that person in the room, it has become a business risk. A scalable Airtable system should be clear enough for the business to own, maintain and improve over time.

What separates a scalable Airtable system from one that eventually becomes fragile? In my experience, fragile systems usually have one thing in common. They only make sense to the people – or sometimes just the one person – who built them. That creates problems over time. One of the things I like about Airtable is that it's largely self-documenting. 💡 Yes, you can add code, but that code is visible within the system. It's also written in JavaScript, which means most developers will be able to understand and work with it. The other issue with fragile systems is the effect they can have on a business. 📉 They can damage the culture 📈 They can limit growth 🤝 They can make it harder to sell the business Sometimes, the people holding onto those fragile systems are simply trying to protect their own jobs. In the process, they're damaging the company as a whole. 🔒 A scalable system shouldn't depend on one person's knowledge. It should be something the business can understand, maintain and build on over time.

COOs and Operations Directors: if spreadsheets are slowing reporting, visibility and workflows, download the guide to see what to fix.