Stop Working for
Your Software
How to use AI to build software that fits the way your business actually works — instead of rebuilding the business around whatever the software expects.
Four ERPs since 2022. Impress, then a NetSuite implementation that lasted five months, then three years of ShopWorks. Every one of them arrived promising to fix the shop, and every one of them ended the same way: my people doing extra work to keep the software happy. This is the story of the fourth — built ourselves, on Odoo, with AI, while still shipping orders every day — and the method you can run in your own business.
By Joseph Simmons · owner, a 40-person custom apparel decorating shop outside Seattle
Kindle & paperback · 35 chapters · five parts
The problem
You didn't buy software. You hired a boss.
Every system we bought came with an unwritten condition: change how you work so the software can keep up. Rename the thing you've called a decoration group since the day you opened. Enter the order twice because the module that knows about art doesn't talk to the module that knows about garments. Keep a spreadsheet on the side for the part nobody's software has ever handled.
None of that shows up on the invoice. It shows up in payroll — in the hours your best people spend feeding the system instead of running the shop. And the worst part is how normal it starts to feel.
The premise of this book is simple: that trade is no longer necessary. For the first time, a small business can build software that matches how it actually works — without a development team, without a six-figure implementation, and without stopping production to do it.
What's inside
Five parts, built in the order you'd actually do it
Not a survey of the ERP market. One shop, one real build, and the reusable method underneath it. I'll tell you plainly what we run and why — but the ladder works on any platform that lets you get at it.
How we got here
The honest accounting of three systems — what each one promised, what it cost in money and in hours, and the pattern that only becomes visible on the third try.
The ladder: Configure, Customize, Connect, Build
The framework the whole book runs on. Every problem in your business sits on one of four rungs, and picking the wrong rung is what turns a two-hour fix into a two-month project.
Working with AI as a builder, not a chatbot
Rules, skills, and context — how to set an assistant up so it knows your business well enough to be trusted with real work, and where it still needs a human between it and the database.
The build, end to end
A real order followed from inbox to invoice. The intake queue, decoration groups, production scheduling, the small automations that nobody sells as a feature, and a sprint that took a machine shop's process from paper to screens.
The ledger, the team, and the objections
What it actually returned. What changed for the people who use it every day. And straight answers to the reasonable objections — including the one about what happens to jobs.
Plus three appendices: the prompts and rules I actually use, a build-order worksheet, and a glossary for owners who don't speak software.
Who this is for
Written for the person who signs the checks and knows where the bodies are buried
You run the place
Owner, GM, ops lead — someone who can decide to change a process, not just complain about it. That authority is the actual prerequisite. Coding is not.
You've been burned
You've done an implementation. Maybe two. You know what a kickoff call sounds like and how far it lands from the shop floor.
Your work is specific
Decoration, fabrication, field service, custom manufacturing — anything where the quote depends on details no generic system has a field for.
It is not a book about apparel decorating. My shop is the case study, not the subject. If your business is specific in its own way, the method transfers.
The platform I build on
I'm not neutral about Odoo
Most books like this hedge here. I'm not going to. Odoo is the reason this book exists — it's the first system in a decade of trying that let me stop asking permission to change my own business.
The difference is structural, not marketing. I can read the source. I can change the part that's wrong for us. I can keep the upgrade path while doing it. Every other system I evaluated wanted me to file a feature request and wait, or pay a consultant to explain my own shop back to me.
We run it on Odoo.sh with our own modules on top. It does things no vendor would ever have built for a forty-person decorator, because no vendor would ever have bothered to.
There's still a chapter on what Odoo does badly, because there is plenty. Loving something isn't the same as pretending it's perfect.
Want to try it?
The free tier is genuinely usable for one app, and there's a trial for the rest — enough to follow along with the whole build in Part Four without spending a dollar. If this book talks you into looking, starting from the link below costs you nothing extra and supports the work here.
Affiliate disclosure: I'm an Odoo affiliate. If you sign up through that link and become a paying subscriber, Odoo pays me a commission on your subscription for the first twelve months. It doesn't change your price. I'd recommend the platform either way — my own shop runs on it — but you deserve to know the incentive. Full disclosure policy.
Who wrote this
I'm not a software guy. That's the whole point.
I own a custom apparel decorating shop in Kent, Washington — screen printing, embroidery, heat transfer, laser etching, contract work for brands you've heard of. About forty people. Real machines, real deadlines, real garments that ship late if we get it wrong.
I didn't set out to build an ERP. I set out to stop paying for one that didn't fit. Everything in this book was written in the middle of running the shop, which is why it's short on theory and long on the specific decisions that cost me time.
“The question was never whether the software could do it. It was whether I could describe how we work clearly enough for someone to build it. AI turned out to be very good at the second part.”
Get the book
Kindle and paperback
Available on Amazon. Kindle Unlimited readers can read it free.
Prefer a sample first? The first chapter is on the blog, in full, no email required.
The build log
An occasional letter about what I'm building next, what broke, and what it cost. Written for owners. No sequence, no funnel, no webinar.
Unsubscribe any time. I don't sell or share the list — it lives in my own database, not a marketing platform.
One more thing
Run a decorating shop?
Then we do the same work and half of this will sound familiar. Email me — I answer these myself, and I've never regretted a conversation with another shop owner.
joe@superiorimprints.com