Technology comes in waves, and we’ve worked through more than a few of them. Three show the pattern most clearly.
1998 · The Internet
Clients bought websites. The value came from rebuilding the systems underneath them. Read the story
2004–2016 · SaaS
Rebuild the model around the technology, or spend $1.67M failing to install it. Read the story
2025 · AI
The same silver bullet, sold to a new market. Readiness decides who captures value. Read the story
The first wave: the Internet
In 1998, Ron helped run an office spun out from a brochure-ware parent. The parent sold websites as the answer to everything. Ron’s office started every engagement with the client’s business problem, then used the Internet to build the systems that solved it. The client list ran from global insurers and energy companies to a federal agency, where the team built the business tools a larger integrator could not deliver.
At one global reinsurer, the team mapped the swimlanes of a full business unit. The client asked for copies of the maps because they did not know their own processes. That gap predated the Internet. The Internet just made it impossible to keep ignoring.
The second wave: SaaS
Ron saw this one coming early. In 2004, he led a subscription research publisher’s conversion from annual print delivery to a fully online model, before the industry had a name for SaaS. The team rebuilt the business around what online delivery made newly possible. Client services and sales gained real-time visibility into what clients were actually reading. The cost to serve dropped, along with contract risk. Most information services firms were still printing and mailing while Ron’s team had already reinvented the operating model around the new technology.
Alison saw what happens when companies take the opposite approach. In 2016, she was hired into a PE-owned software firm that had spent $1.67 million over two years failing to implement its own ERP. The internal team was building the new system around how they already worked in their old, disjointed accounting tools. Alison restarted from scratch, deferred customizations until after go-live, and got five business units and forty global subsidiaries live in nine months for under a million dollars.
Two scenes, same lesson. Build new technology to match how your team already works and you spend $1.67 million failing. Rethink how your team works to take advantage of the technology and you reinvent the business model while competitors keep doing it the old way.
The current wave: AI
In May 2025, Alison filled in on an AI panel at an exit-planning industry event in Denver, invited specifically because she is a known AI skeptic. The other panelists described enterprise AI initiatives that bore no resemblance to how a $30M business actually operates. The audience tried to translate the case studies into something their own businesses could use. They couldn’t, because what they were being sold was the same silver bullet Ron saw sold in 1998.
The numbers tell the same story. MIT puts enterprise AI pilot failure at 95 percent. McKinsey finds 88 percent of companies using AI and only 39 percent seeing any bottom-line impact. The companies that fail aren’t unlucky. They’re skipping the step where their operations get ready for what they’re trying to add.
How we work
Two lenses, one plan
Operations is an ecosystem of people, processes, and data. You can’t see the whole thing from any single angle, which is why we work together. The two perspectives meet at the tactical layer, where the actual plan gets built.
Ron Gerrans
Top-down
Thirty years running and rebuilding operating businesses, as CFO, CEO, and operator, through the Internet, SaaS, cloud, and mobile waves. Ron works from strategy down toward execution: where the business is going, and what the operation must become to get there.
Alison McQuillan
Bottom-up
Founder of The Streamliners. Alison starts from the financials and the operational reality: what the numbers say, what the team actually does, and where the two disagree. A known AI skeptic, which is exactly the point.
We won’t bring AI into an engagement before the company is operationally ready for what they’re asking for. The roadmap always comes first, and fixing the operational foundation is next.
“We won’t be the firm you hire to add AI on top of ineffective operations and watch it scale the dysfunction.”
Ready to find where AI pays?
Start with a conversation. Write to solutions@thestreamliners.ai and tell us where AI sits in your business today.