“Maybe the firm was too big. Maybe it was too small. The reality was that it never was “just right”." From working inside large enterprise-scale software engineering operations to helping the smallest mom-and-pop shop with a small local software project, Craig spent many days and nights working both in and on businesses.

He learned from the large enterprise-scale firms that it was usually the actual coder(s) and the client who suffered most. The coder would be paid very little while being expected to churn out highly sophisticated work without much brief or ability to affect a better outcome having known the details more granularly.

On the other hand, the client was paying a premium for all those middlemen to mishandle or miscommunicate the information needed. Needless to say, projects would take longer than they needed to, and the best foot forward for the client would get compromised as the large-scale firm needed to manage its own hard costs when projects got convoluted.

When Craig’s career took him down a path to begin his own startup, Pinot’s Palette, he decided to take all of his software projects for the business in-house. They coded their own proprietary products to help the business function at a high level and quickly grew the franchise business to 140 locations around the United States.

After succeeding that business, Craig took to working with startups and friends to help with smaller projects and through those experiences, he came to realize that these smaller companies could grow faster if someone invested the time early enough with them to “do things well, and right”. It may not always be possible to avoid error or issue, but at least he knew those were true, real issues compared to mishandlings or communication breakdowns between clients, project managers, and coders that could have easily been prevented at the enterprise-level.

Craig began work some years back with an incredible startup called sEATz. sEATz, a mobile in-seat ordering application of food, beverage, gift shop apparel and otherwise for sports and entertainment venues around the nation started small. He knew how to get them just what they needed, not too much and not too little by patching together a makeshift team of freelance software engineers and a few full-time resources and stood-in as their CTO. Together they built the first sEATz MVP (minimum viable product). With an MVP at their fingertips, the startup was able to go out, demo, and raise additional rounds of capital for growth and scale.

Soon after, Craig’s experiences nudged him to the epiphany that he would start that “just right” software engineering firm, T-Minus Solutions. Having been on both sides of the business as a software engineer and a startup founder himself, he built the T-Minus Solutions team to “stand-in” as a non-technical founder’s CTO, to build their software needs from the ground up with thoughtful intention and to take out all the confusing middle-steps that cause overwhelming costs for an early-stage founder.

T-Minus Solutions is here to help entrepreneurs, startups, founders, and mid-market companies grow and scale.

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