Can We Not Duct-Tape Seven Apps Together? with Bryant Solomon

Same problem throughout — this reads as a construction industry blog, not a Can We Not? post. Someone who runs a marketing agency or a boutique services firm would bounce by the second paragraph.

The bones are good. The structure works. It just needs the construction-specific framing loosened up so the ideas land for any founder with a messy back office.

Here's the revamp:

You're Not as Special as Your Tech Stack Thinks

Bryant Solomon had a problem. He knew how to build software. His brother-in-law JD ran a construction company. And every month, JD's firm was closing out the books across seven or eight different applications — none of which talked to each other, all of which had to be manually synced, all of which required separate training for whoever was brave enough to touch them.

"And if you just have Ethel running the front office," Bryant said on the Can We Not? podcast, "that doesn't go well."

Poor Ethel.

Before Bryant wrote a single line of code for ControlQore, he left a comfortable banking tech job to go work inside JD's business. Not to consult. Not to advise from a safe distance. To actually run the accounting — to understand it from inside the mess. "I've gotta make sure that I understand what's underneath it before I go out and try to build technology around it."

That decision shaped everything that came after.

When the Workaround Has a Workaround

ControlQore is built for construction. But the problem Bryant is solving isn't unique to construction — it just happens to be especially visible there.

Most small businesses are running a version of the same thing: a tool they adopted when the business was smaller, a spreadsheet that filled a gap, a second tool that filled a gap in the first tool, and somewhere along the way a system that nobody fully understands and everyone is slightly afraid to change. It works, sort of. It's just that "works, sort of" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Bryant's industry compounds this because the accounting is genuinely complex — job costing, project contracts, tracking profitability at the job level — and the software built for it hasn't meaningfully evolved in years. So contractors defaulted to tools that weren't designed for them and built workarounds on top. The workarounds became the system. The system became untouchable.

ControlQore exists to replace five of those tools with one. Not to add a layer — to remove them.

Why Cheap Capital Made This Worse

Here's where Bryant gets on a soapbox worth staying for.

A lot of startups in his space got early VC money. The mandate: grow fast, fill seats, keep churn down, figure out the product later. The result was technology that was interesting on a pitch deck and painful in practice. Customers got burned. They got skeptical. They went back to their cobbled-together stack because at least they knew where everything was.

Bryant has sat across from hundreds of investors. Most couldn't get past his team's refusal to fit the standard growth playbook. So he stopped chasing that capital and started building a business that could sustain itself.

His advice to any founder drowning in complexity: "Build a good business, have a good business model, get to profitability, and then start talking to investors. Don't waste your time trying to talk to investors before you've built a sustainable business model — for your own freaking sanity."

The Data Hoarding Problem

Bryant has walked into businesses with over 300 line items in their chart of accounts. His read every time: someone convinced themselves their operation was complex enough to require a level of detail that nobody else needs.

Usually it isn't.

The more granular you make your system, the more it depends on the right person making the right call at every step. That person is busy. The thing that needed to be coded sits in their inbox. The month-end gets messy. You've built a visibility system that creates more work than the visibility is worth.

Sam connects this to the founder spreadsheet problem — the massive dashboard full of metrics that tells a story nobody has time to read. Traction puts the right number of KPIs somewhere around 10 to 15. Not 300. The question isn't what data could you track. It's what do you actually need to know to run the business.

"The desire for data can get unhealthy quickly," Bryant said. That's true in construction accounting and it's true in every other back office too.

Marketing: Measurable vs. Just Expensive

Bryant is careful here — his co-founder Caleb handles marketing and he doesn't want to start anything. But the honest version: a lot of marketing spend goes out without a clear line back to revenue. Fractional CMOs, email campaigns, cold outreach — they might work. They're also hard to calculate ROI on before you have any baseline data to compare against.

His customers, specifically, don't love cold emails and phone calls. They're not at a desk. The standard playbook doesn't fit.

So Bryant makes TikToks instead. Cheap, janky, deliberately dumb videos that show he understands his industry and can make jokes about it. No script. No production budget. The goal isn't conversion — it's that someone sees ControlQore attached to something that made them laugh instead of something that clogged their inbox.

"Now it's, 'dude, that guy from ControlQore is super funny. I don't know what he does, but he's funny at least.'" That's a different first impression than a cold email.

Sam's note: she has never downloaded TikTok, watches content on Facebook like a grandma, and misses his skits on LinkedIn.

Four Co-Founders, One Company

Bryant, JD, Caleb, and their CTO Uni make decisions together. Bryant and JD disagree most often — and are also the closest, in that way that only happens when two people have worked through enough conflict to stop taking it personally.

Two days before recording they'd had a disagreement that could have gotten heated. Bryant looked at JD, said he was sorry, offered a hug. JD told him to get away. They moved on.

The throughline Bryant kept coming back to: most business decisions aren't clearly right or wrong. They land somewhere in the gray. You make a call, time tells you something, and you adjust. The idea that you'll get clean opportunities to "admit you were wrong" sounds good but rarely works that way — because the situation is rarely that clean. What actually holds a partnership together is staying anchored to the shared goal and trusting that the other people in the room want the same thing.

All four of them share a faith foundation, and Bryant said it plainly: after you've experienced real repentance and forgiveness, it's easier to remember that the person across the table from you matters just as much as you do. That's not a business framework. It's just true.

Your Problems Are Not That Exotic

The sharpest moment in the episode comes when Bryant describes the mindset that makes back offices unnecessarily complicated: the belief that something about your business is unique enough to require workarounds nobody else needs.

Sam matched it with a Bluey episode. Muffin gets told she's the most special kid in the world and decides that means the rules don't apply to her. She's wrong. So is anyone running seven apps because they've convinced themselves their operation is too particular for a normal solution.

Your problems are more common than you think. The solution that worked for someone else might work for you — if you're willing to let it.

Bryant Solomon is co-founder of ControlQore. Find him on LinkedIn or on TikTok, where he makes dumb videos about construction accounting with no production budget and zero regrets. More episodes of Can We Not? at canwenotpodcast.com.