The Retiring Owner: 25 years of customer data, a buyer who needed modern systems, and 90 days to make it work.

The call came on a Thursday afternoon.

Owner of a distribution business. 25 years of customer relationships in a FoxPro database. Buyer lined up. Deal almost done.

Buyer's condition: modern systems before handover.

Timeline: 90 days.

The first thing we did was look at what was actually there. Not assume. Look.

The database had evolved in ways nobody had documented. Pricing logic from three different commercial arrangements. Customer codes referencing companies that no longer existed. A field called MISC_FLAG controlling discount rules for 60 accounts. Nobody remembered why. It was just there. And it mattered.

This is the thing about legacy systems. They're not just data. They're decisions - made at 5pm on a Wednesday when something broke and someone fixed it and moved on.

The migration took 11 weeks. The extra three were archaeology. Finding the rules. Understanding them. Deciding what to carry forward.

We didn't replace the business logic. We decoded it, documented it, and moved it.

The new system ran. The handover happened. The deal closed.

This is the story of a lot of businesses. The ending depends on when you start the conversation.