Your Numbers Won't Kill You. Ignoring Them Will.

Crate & Barrel: A Case Study

Many of the founders I work with are afraid of their own data. They don't say it that way; they say "we don't have time to track that," "we're still figuring things out," or "I don't want to get bogged down in spreadsheets when we should be building."

But underneath that, there's usually fear. If they look at the numbers, they might be bad. If they know exactly how little runway we have, it becomes real. If everything is tracked, it'll crush the creative energy that got them here.

So they don't look. And then they're blindsided by problems they could have seen coming months earlier.

The founders of Crate & Barrel nearly killed their company this way. In the 1960s, they stumbled onto a real opportunity: European furniture bought directly from factories, sold to American consumers who couldn't find it anywhere else. Good instincts, real demand.

But they didn't plan. They raised money by asking a single person for a large sum rather than spreading the risk. They projected annual revenue by multiplying their first month's sales, which happened to fall on a major holiday, and assumed every month would look like that. They sold furniture without tracking their actual costs because their suppliers' invoices were incomplete or missing. They were literally selling at cost without realizing it.

They survived, but barely, mostly through luck and word of mouth that happened to take off. That's not a model you can rely on.

Here's what I tell founders who resist tracking their numbers: the data isn't the problem. The situation is the situation whether you measure it or not. What changes when you measure it is that you can actually respond and cut costs strategically before you're desperate and underwater. With data, they see the slow months coming, rather than getting ambushed by them.

You don't need perfect data. You need enough to make decisions. And "I don't have time" usually means "I'm spending all my time reacting to emergencies that better data would have helped prevent.