An Electrician's Crew Kept Getting Locked Out of Municipal Portals. The Fix Took One Call.

Not every technology problem needs a technology solution. Sometimes it just needs someone who's seen the problem before.

The situation

An electrical company operating across multiple states had crews in the field who regularly needed to access municipal permitting portals — different towns, different systems, different logins. The company had accounts set up for each portal, but the two-factor authentication codes were tied to one person's phone back at the office.

So every time a field worker needed to log in to check a permit status, submit paperwork, or pull inspection requirements, they had to call the office. The person with the 2FA codes had to stop what they were doing, read off the code, and hope the worker typed it in before it expired. If that person was on another call, in a meeting, or out sick — nobody could log in.

What was actually going wrong

On the surface this looked like a 2FA problem. But the real issue was access management. The company had grown from one location to multiple states, and the login process that worked when it was two people sharing a desk didn't scale to a distributed team. Nobody had stopped to rethink how credentials were shared when the team spread out.

This is common. Small businesses build processes that work at their current size, and those processes quietly break as the company grows. Nobody notices until it's costing real time every day.

The fix

We set them up with a shared password manager — organized vaults by state and municipality, each containing the login credentials and 2FA tokens for that portal. Field workers access the vault from their phone, get the login and the current 2FA code, and they're in. No phone call to the office. No waiting. No single point of failure.

The whole thing took one conversation to diagnose and a couple of hours to set up. No custom software. No ongoing maintenance. Just the right tool configured properly for how their team actually works.

Why this matters

It would have been easy to over-engineer this. Build a custom portal. Set up SSO. Create an internal tool with role-based access. All of those are real solutions to this problem, and all of them would have taken weeks and cost thousands of dollars for a company that just needed their guys to log in without calling the office.

The best consultants aren't the ones who build the most sophisticated solution. They're the ones who find the simplest one that actually works. Sometimes that's a system we build from scratch. Sometimes it's a 30-minute phone call and a $3/month subscription to a password manager.

The value isn't in the complexity of the solution. It's in knowing which solution fits the problem.