About Us

Terrier Solutions is one guy; Tom Stanke. I have over 30 years of experience developing software applications and managing all aspects of information technology. I have an Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration. Most of my experience was gained through employment in the “corporate world.” I understand the importance of budgets. I understand investing in technology can be costly and risky. And I strongly believe for a true competitive advantage technology must be implemented to fit the business, and not force the business to fit the technology.

I know a lot of people get turned off by a one person operation like Terrier Solutions. They think their environment is too complex, or their needs too great for one person to take on. In some cases that may be true. But you’d be surprised what a small operation can do. You eliminate a lot of overhead, finger pointing and failed communications when you work with a smaller organization.

Along the way, I’ve learned some valuable lessons that I apply to my business:

• Don’t underestimate the cost of not doing something. Too often people only focus on the costs of doing something. Your competition is investing to make themselves more efficient.  If you don’t keep up you’ll be facing some lost opportunity costs sooner or later.
• Don’t get bogged down shooting for total perfection. In most cases delivering/implementing something that is reasonably close can still provide huge benefit. Even small changes can have a dramatic benefit on efficiency and productivity.
• Don’t over promise. This one’s tough because there is always someone you’re competing against that will (either intentionally or through ignorance). As tempting as it may be to “promise the world”, things need to be kept real and expectations need to be in line with the finished product. This leads to trust which leads to future work.
• Don’t try to optimize too early. Doing so can be a huge waste of time and money. The reality is with most ‘one-off’ computer programs there isn’t a need to do a lot of optimization as a partially optimized implementation is typically a huge improvement over the old method.

With Terrier Solutions you get a resource with both technical and business experience.