Turning Constraints into Competitive Advantage
Scrappy solutions get you moving—but you need a plan to evolve them before they slow you down.
Bricolage is about progress over perfection. Those who never attempt it never get moving. Those who cling to it forever never reach scale. The art is knowing when to make do, and when to upgrade.
Bricolage is the art of making progress with the tools you already have. It’s the spreadsheet that doubles as a CRM, the folding table that becomes a storefront, the prototype stitched together from off-the-shelf parts. It’s not elegant—but it gets you moving.
The power of bricolage is that it removes excuses. You don’t need perfect conditions to start learning. But the danger is falling in love with these makeshift fixes. They get you moving, but left unchecked, they become anchors that hold you back.
Think of bricolage as a bridge. It’s meant to carry you across uncertainty—not to serve as the permanent foundation of your business.
For startups, bricolage removes barriers to entry. For established businesses, it unlocks faster testing. In both cases, the goal is to learn whether your idea has traction before committing significant resources.
A growing company needed order tracking but wasn’t ready for a full ERP. Instead, they hacked together Airtable with Zapier for $50 a month. Was it robust? No. Did it buy them a year of learning about their real needs before investing six figures? Absolutely.
Key insight: The best system is the one that works now and creates data to guide your next move.
Opening a flagship store might take years. The bricolage approach is a pop-up booth, a shared retail shelf, or even a weekend kiosk. Low investment, high learning value. Customers vote with their wallets, and you discover what resonates before scaling.
The point: Bricolage lets you test markets you couldn’t otherwise afford to explore.
Those who avoid bricolage wait endlessly for perfect conditions. Those who over-invest build solutions to problems they don’t yet understand. Bricolage keeps focus on the core: do customers care?
Remember: Bricolage isn’t about being cheap—it’s about being smart with resources while you learn.
Every workaround creates hidden debt. The solution that accelerates you today may quietly accumulate costs, inefficiencies, or risks that compound over time. Left unchecked, bricolage shifts from enabler to obstacle.
That $50 stopgap system might run fine at $5M in sales. At $15M, the cracks appear: performance lags, errors multiply, compliance becomes impossible, and employees spend more time patching the tool than serving customers.
Unchecked bricolage becomes drag, not lift.
• Removes immediate barrier
• Clear upgrade plan exists
• Generates data for the next step
• Benefits outweigh costs
• Becomes permanent by default
• No plan or budget to upgrade
• Slows growth instead of enabling it
• Hidden costs exceed value
One logistics team ran routes with a Google Sheet and chat thread. Perfect for five trucks. At 25, the system collapsed: compliance checks failed, customers demanded real-time visibility, and bids required certified reporting. Their bricolage debt came due overnight.
Healthy bricolage anticipates this moment and prepares the upgrade before the collapse.
The lesson: Track not just cost savings, but the inevitable costs of replacing your patchwork. Budget the upgrade from day one.
The key to bricolage is discernment: know where creativity is a strength, and where it’s reckless. Some areas benefit from scrappy solutions; others demand reliability from day one.
Internal, Low-Risk:
• Project management hacks
• Simple dashboards
• Prototyping workflows
• Lightweight inventory tracking
Market Testing:
• Pop-ups and kiosks
• Pilot marketing automation
• Limited service offerings
• Small-batch product runs
Customer-Facing:
• E-commerce checkouts
• Payment systems
• Support portals
• Service guarantees
Compliance & Security:
• Financial reporting
• Payroll
• Data protection
• Regulatory filings
Ask before bricolaging:
1. If this breaks, what’s the cost?
2. What’s the upgrade path?
3. What do we learn by doing this scrappy?
4. What’s the opportunity cost of waiting?
5. When will we revisit this choice?
Rule of thumb: Bricolage for learning. Buy for scale. Upgrade when reliability matters more than flexibility.
The best companies don’t avoid bricolage—they outgrow it. They treat it as temporary scaffolding, replacing it step by step with durable structures built from real data, not assumptions.
Stage 1: Pure Bricolage (early stage)
Everything is held together with creativity. Focus is proving demand and reaching product–market fit.
Stage 2: Selective Professionalization
Customer-facing systems become robust. Internal hacks remain where they work without risk.
Stage 3: Systematic Replacement
Core operations move to scalable systems. Bricolage remains for experiments and edge cases.
Stage 4: Enterprise Operations
Professional systems power mission-critical areas. Bricolage exists only in innovation and R&D.
• Customers feel system strain
• Manual work consumes >20% of staff time
• Compliance or reporting breaks down
• Error rates rise with volume
• Integration costs exceed replacement cost
• Base requirements on lived usage
• Migrate gradually, not all at once
• Keep backups during transition
• Train teams before switching over
• Add 50% more time than vendors promise
• Replacing systems too early
• Over-engineering for imagined problems
• Skipping change management
• Choosing features over reliability
• Underestimating complexity
One company began with Airtable and Zapier. That got them to their first few million in sales. Next came a mid-tier cloud tool, then a proper ERP. Today they run a full enterprise suite—but still prototype new workflows in Airtable before formal rollout.
Key insight: The best organizations never abandon bricolage entirely—they just use it selectively, where speed matters most.
Once your core operations are professionalized, bricolage becomes a powerful innovation tool. It lets you test new markets, products, or processes quickly and cheaply—without risking the core business.
Your main business runs on stable, enterprise-grade systems. Your experiments use rapid prototypes, lightweight tools, and creative hacks. The dual standard allows speed where it matters and reliability where it’s required.
Core Operations: Secure platforms, standardized reporting, compliance-ready systems
Innovation Work: No-code tools, API mashups, temporary pilots, lean experiments
This balance lets you adapt to change faster than organizations weighed down by process alone.
Speed to Market
Test ideas in weeks, not quarters
Low-Risk Testing
Fail small, learn fast
Market Validation
Prove demand before scaling
A company considered offering a new service line. Instead of building infrastructure, they partnered with an existing provider and used simple forms and email to manage requests. In three months, they validated demand and later invested with confidence.
The bricolage pilot reduced risk while accelerating insight.
The insight: Mature businesses that keep bricolage alive in pockets of experimentation stay adaptive longer than those that over-standardize.
Winning companies understand bricolage as a tool, not a philosophy. They use it to start, to learn, and to innovate—but they never let it become a permanent crutch.
Use bricolage to clear early barriers and test assumptions without over-investing.
Replace temporary fixes before they become liabilities—but only when you understand the real need.
Protect bricolage as a discipline for experimentation even as the rest of the business professionalizes.
Whether you’re a startup building your first processes or an established business testing new markets, the right balance of bricolage and structure makes the difference. Let’s design a strategy that fits your stage and ambition.