About the Capo Way

Reactionary thinking, budget miscues, missed timelines, “Not Invented Here” – they frustrate us too.

So we follow a code to help keep these frustrations away. We’re driven to apply and improve approaches that scale e-commerce, reduce risk and accelerate returns.  But we’ll be the first to admit our methods and beliefs aren’t for everyone.

Here’s more about what makes us (and our lasting client relationships) tick.

Beyond ‘Rip and Replace’

You aren’t new to e-commerce and likely have spent significant time and resources building a system, custom or otherwise. Now, you realize it needs to be fortified for bigger growth targets and scale.  In walk some typical experts, and you’re served up this stroke of genius: “We need to start over.” Sometimes that’s true, but more often it was their goal all along to maximize fees and shoe-horn providers’ in-house expertise. We’re proud to have salvaged and integrated many inherited components and processes on the road to client successes. Our goal is to help clients make decisions and understand trade-offs, and we commit ourselves to the grit and creativity to do so.

Blueprinting Brings Confidence

The unfortunate convention: do some light digging, guess the right budget and Go! Such starts a frustrating ride of building the airplane in the air, expecting to Change Order the effort to the finish. This approach blows up timelines, increases costs and erodes trust. It’s as unnecessary as it is unfortunate. The Capo approach mixes upfront discipline and transparency, resulting in a collaborative blueprinting and confident roadmap for all to work against. So much so, we insist the blueprint phase is a project unto itself without the expectation of execution. We expect to earn the full scope and the necessary trust to do it right.

Thinking Holistically

Build a scalable store, integrate it into the business operations, drive traffic, convert, re-market, and continually optimize. Might sound simple enough, but we all know it’s not easy. Regardless, we believe each of these areas (and the many microcosms therein) should be considered in the business-driving context of the whole system, both for today and supporting goals of tomorrow. Our expertise spans the full spectrum.

Purpose-Built Teams With Global Talent

The crux of the typical solution provider/technology partner model is utilization, which turns busy, employed hands into better margin.  From experience, that doesn’t always translate into the right expertise or appropriate level of rigor for the job at hand. Times have changed, notably with the advance of technology. Now, we feel it’s imperative to deploy a better mix, including domestic leaders for strategy and continuity alongside a contracted-but-consistent global talent base that can be hand-picked for challenging tasks.  It keeps our system agile, and client interests front and center.

Extreme Communication

We believe communication comes down to a commitment of “early and often.” In our experience, lack of communication is almost always behind the costliest mistakes.  There’s simply no need to further complicate what is already a complex endeavor. We willingly take on a leadership role in helping clients identify inputs and stakeholders necessary for success. And we routinely (at minimum, weekly) keep the team on the path with transparent progress reports and priority objectives. We know the most successful projects embrace transparency, reject finger-pointing and won’t tolerate hiding.

Buy Over Build

There is simply no longer a need to build e-commerce solutions from scratch. In our experience serving and building enterprises, businesses are fairly similar in their processes and supply chains. We’ve found that any reputable and proven software solution has been engineered to solve most of the business needs out of the box. Experts can then focus on customizing the remaining, say 20%, of idiosyncrasies, which makes for a better business proposition. Plus businesses can avoid the lifetime of internal maintenance and group think that often accompanies the unique code in exchange for a platform’s inherent R&D and value-added innovation.

There’s certainly more to the Capo Way, but hopefully this gives you a good idea of how we view a successful e-commerce engagement. We always look forward to continuous learning and improvement with each of our clients and partners as this channel becomes more and more critical to mid-market businesses every day.

See our way at work.