Some consulting wins come from perfect execution. Others come from how you respond when things go wrong.
In consulting, some lessons come easy. Others are forged in high-stakes moments that test your integrity, resilience, and commitment to doing what’s right. Trench Tales is a blog series dedicated to sharing those defining experiences—the moments that shaped us, challenged us, and reinforced the core principles that guide Datagize today.
The year is 2000. The consulting firm I co-founded had built a custom sales commission system for a major client — before any of the big software vendors had even developed their own sales compensation modules. It handled sales territory assignments, overlays, and complex commission formulas. After the client was acquired, we adapted the system for their parent company.
One night, during a critical monthly commission run, something went wrong. The system wasn’t calculating commissions correctly. Time was running out. The client’s leadership was panicked. The executive of sales operations flew in from Canada to oversee the crisis firsthand.
I had just been diagnosed with pneumonia and was at home when the call came in. The IT Director was frantic. The system they had invested so much in was failing at the worst possible time. He wasn’t just asking for help — he was asking for our presence.
So I showed up.
The War Room
As soon as I arrived at the client’s office, I took charge and established a War Room. Within minutes, we had assembled a cross-functional response team — our consultants and client engineers, all focused on one goal: finding the root cause. The stakes were enormous. If we failed, it wouldn’t just damage our reputation — it could cost client executives their jobs.
For 48 hours, we lived in that War Room. We worked in teams, pushing through exhaustion. Some of the brightest minds in the industry were on that office floor, including a PhD software architect who later went on to design a revolutionary virtual keyboard. Yet, despite our collective expertise, the issue eluded us.
Still, we refused to fail.
After 40 straight hours of debugging, log analysis, and relentless testing, our architect spotted something — an anomaly buried deep in the system. A single point of failure. A fixable one.
We patched it. We tested it. It worked.
Just in time to complete the commission run and restore confidence in the system—and in us.
After the dust settled, the client executive pulled me aside. He told me he had never, in all his years professionally, seen a war room run so effectively. The way we coordinated efforts across teams, stayed focused under pressure, and executed with precision left a lasting impression. Our commitment impressed him more than anything technical we may have achieved.
Why This Matters to The Datagize Way
This wasn’t about fixing a system. It was about showing up when it mattered most.
This experience helped shape the ethos of Datagize — where Integrity, Client-Centricity, and Pragmatism aren’t just words. They are how we operate. We take ownership. We stand by our clients. We do whatever it takes to get the job done.
Not every consulting firm would have stayed in that War Room. We did. And that relentless commitment is what defines The Datagize Way.
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