In the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress was making decisions that would determine the fate of three million people — based on information that was weeks old, often wrong, and sometimes deliberately falsified by British intelligence.
They didn't know how many troops the British were moving. They didn't know which colonial governors were loyal and which were wavering. They didn't have reliable counts of their own soldiers. The economic data on the colonies was scattered across thirteen separate governments with no common accounting system. Supply chains were improvised. Revenue was theoretical. The currency they were printing was, charitably, speculative.
And yet they built something that lasted.
Not because they had good data. Because they had a clear sense of what they were trying to build, the discipline to make decisions with incomplete information, and the wisdom to build systems that would improve their information over time.
If you're running a $5M or $15M or $25M business, you face a version of the same challenge every single day. You're making decisions that matter — about customers, inventory, hiring, marketing, pricing — with information that is incomplete, often delayed, and sometimes just wrong. The question isn't whether you have perfect data. Nobody does. The question is whether you have a system for getting better information, faster, as you grow.
The Data the Founders Actually Had
It's worth being specific about what they were working with — because it reframes what "good enough" data actually means.
The first federal census wasn't until 1790 — four years after the Constitution was ratified. Before that, population estimates for the colonies ranged wildly depending on who was counting and what they were trying to prove. Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the most rigorous empiricists of his era, estimated the colonial population at various points in his life and was off by millions.
Trade data was similarly chaotic. Merchants kept their own ledgers in incompatible formats. Customs records were inconsistent. Smuggling was so widespread that official import and export figures were essentially fiction. When Alexander Hamilton was tasked with building the financial system of the new nation, he was working from estimates built on estimates.
Military intelligence was even less reliable. George Washington famously maintained a network of spies — the Culper Ring — specifically because he couldn't trust any single source of information. His genius wasn't having better data than the British. It was having a system for triangulating incomplete data from multiple sources and making decisions faster than the enemy could respond.
"We must consult our means rather than our wishes."
— George Washington, 1776That sentence is the most useful thing any general — or business owner — has ever said about operating under uncertainty. Not: wait until you have better information. Not: make it up and hope. Consult your means. Know what you actually have. Make the best decision available given the reality in front of you. Then build better means for next time.
Four Founders. Four Data Problems. Four Lessons.
Each of the key figures in the founding era solved a different version of the same problem — making consequential decisions with imperfect information while building systems that would improve over time. The parallels to running a growing business are almost uncomfortably direct.
The business lesson: Don't wait for one clean data source. Connect your CRM, your accounting system, and your marketing platform — even imperfectly — and you'll see things that none of them shows you alone.
The business lesson: You can't always get good data before you make a decision. But you can build the systems now that will give you better data for the next decision.
The business lesson: The data you need is often already in your business. Your salespeople know which objections they hear most. Your operations team knows where the bottlenecks are. The insight is in the room — it just hasn't been organized.
The business lesson: The data system that works for a $5M business will break at $15M. Build for the next stage, not just the current one.
The Real Tension: Speed vs. Certainty
The founding era is full of examples of consequential decisions made without anything close to complete information. The Declaration of Independence was signed before anyone knew whether France would join the war. The Constitution was ratified before anyone had tested whether a federal system would actually function. The Louisiana Purchase was negotiated without a survey of what was being bought.
In every case, the alternative — waiting for better information — would have been worse than acting on incomplete information. The British weren't going to pause the war while Congress collected better census data. Napoleon wasn't going to hold the Louisiana Territory indefinitely while Jefferson commissioned a survey.
This is the central tension of running a growing business. And it maps almost exactly onto the decisions you face every week.
| The Founding Decision | The Business Equivalent | What Made It Work |
|---|---|---|
| Declaring independence before knowing if France would help | Launching a new product before knowing if the market exists | Enough early signals to justify the bet. A plan to learn fast once committed. |
| Crossing the Delaware on Christmas night with incomplete troop counts | Entering a new market before the competitive analysis is done | Speed as a weapon. The decision to act was itself the advantage. |
| Ratifying the Constitution before knowing if the states would comply | Building infrastructure for scale before you've hit scale | Designing for the future you're building toward, not the present you're in. |
| Assuming federal debt without knowing if states would accept it | Investing in data systems before the ROI is proven | Understanding that the infrastructure is the investment, not just the output. |
The Nimbleness Problem — And Why Growing Companies Lose It
Here's the thing about the founders that gets overlooked. They weren't just making big strategic decisions. They were making hundreds of small operational decisions simultaneously — about supply chains, personnel, communications, finance — while trying to keep the whole enterprise from collapsing.
Washington managed an army that had, at various points, no shoes, no ammunition, and no reliable food supply. He did it by staying close to the information, making decisions quickly with whatever he had, and updating his approach constantly as conditions changed. He didn't wait for the perfect plan. He executed the best available plan and adapted.
That's what nimbleness actually means. Not the absence of process. Not the freedom to make it up as you go. The ability to make good decisions quickly with the information available, and to update those decisions quickly as better information arrives.
Growing businesses lose nimbleness not because they get bigger. They lose it because their information systems don't keep pace with their complexity. At $3 million in revenue, the founder knows everything by walking the floor. At $15 million, there are too many transactions, too many customers, too many suppliers, and too many employees for any one person to hold in their head. The decisions that used to happen in a conversation now require a meeting — because nobody has the same picture of what's happening.
The companies that stay nimble at $15 million are the ones that built information systems at $5 million. Not because the systems slow them down. Because the systems give everyone the same picture — which makes decisions faster, not slower.
"The strength of a nation, like the strength of an individual, is not determined by the resources at its command but by the wisdom with which those resources are employed."
— Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 30What Hamilton Would Do With Your Business Data
Hamilton was, at his core, a systems builder. He didn't just solve the immediate financial crisis of the new nation — he built the architecture that would allow the country to solve its own financial problems for the next two centuries. The national bank, the customs system, the federal credit structure — these weren't solutions. They were infrastructure for finding solutions.
If Hamilton were advising a $10 million business owner today, I think he'd ask three questions:
- Where is your money actually coming from? Not by category — by customer, by product, by channel, by transaction. If you can't answer this at a granular level, you're flying by feel the same way the Continental Congress was flying by feel when it was printing money with no tax base to back it.
- Where is it going — and is that where you intended it to go? Most businesses have significant variance between the budget they planned and the budget they actually executed. That variance is information. It's telling you something about your assumptions that your spreadsheet isn't.
- What does this tell you about the next twelve months? The past is data. The future is a model. The model is only as good as the data it's built on — but it's infinitely better than a guess, which is what most growing companies are operating on when they plan.
The founders didn't have the luxury of perfect information. But the best of them had the discipline to collect the best available information systematically, the wisdom to make decisions without waiting for certainty, and the foresight to build systems that would improve their information over time.
That's exactly what a growing business needs. Not a data warehouse or a machine learning model or a team of analysts. A clear picture of what's actually happening, delivered fast enough to act on, organized well enough to learn from.
The One Thing Washington Got Right That Most Business Owners Get Wrong
Washington made a decision early in the war that seems small but was probably decisive. He formalized his intelligence network. He didn't just collect information — he created a system for collecting it, a process for evaluating it, and a method for acting on it.
Before the Culper Ring, Washington was getting intelligence the way most business owners get it — through informal conversations, trusted contacts, and whatever happened to cross his desk. After the Culper Ring, he had a system. The quality of the intelligence didn't change dramatically. The reliability did. And reliability, it turns out, is worth more than occasional brilliance.
Most business owners I talk to have brilliant data moments. A salesperson mentions that three customers this month complained about the same thing. A manager notices that Tuesday afternoons are always slower than they should be. An accountant flags that one product line is eating margin nobody knew was at risk.
Those moments are real. But they're not a system. A system means those observations happen automatically, get recorded, get surfaced to the right person, and inform a decision — every time, not just when someone happens to notice.
Washington won a revolution with a system built on 18th-century technology — handwritten notes, dead drops, and carrier pigeons. You have considerably better tools. The question is whether you're using them with the same discipline.
Build the system. Make better decisions.
I help $3M–$30M companies build the information infrastructure that lets them stay nimble as they grow. A two-week Data Assessment maps what you have, finds what's missing, and gives you a 90-day plan to fix it.
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