The day I became a spreadsheet guy.

Nobody dreams of becoming a spreadsheet guy.

You do not sit in a college classroom imagining the day you will develop strong feelings about lifecycle stages, field hygiene, source attribution, and whether "Working" is a sales status or a cry for help.

And yet life comes at you fast.

I started as a writer. That is the clean origin story, at least. I liked sentences. I liked research. I liked the weird little click that happens when a messy thought turns into a clear paragraph. I still do. There is no dashboard on earth that can replace the satisfaction of deleting a sentence that deserved it.

Then I became the first digital marketing hire in a company that had a lot of real-world complexity and very little modern GTM machinery. Which is a polite way of saying: there were jobs to do and almost none of the jobs came with instructions.

At first, the work looked like marketing in the normal sense. Websites. Campaigns. Content. Search. Email. Events. Decks. The visible stuff.

Then the questions started getting harder.

Where did this lead come from?

Did sales call them?

Why does this source show 3 different values in 3 different systems?

Are these opportunities real?

Which campaign influenced the deal?

Why is this account in the wrong vertical?

Who owns follow-up?

What do we tell the board?

A funny thing happens when you keep answering those questions. You stop being satisfied with stories. You start wanting evidence. Then, if you are unlucky enough to be curious, you start wanting the evidence to be captured correctly at the moment it is born.

That is how the spreadsheet gets you.

At first it is one tracker. Then it is a better tracker. Then the tracker needs definitions. Then the definitions need owners. Then the owners need a cadence. Then the cadence needs a dashboard. Then the dashboard exposes a field problem. Then the field problem exposes a process problem. Then you are in a meeting saying, with alarming sincerity, "We need a shared definition of SQL."

This is the moment the old version of you leaves the room.

I used to think RevOps was where creativity went to fill out forms. I was wrong. RevOps is where a company decides whether it wants to know the truth badly enough to make the truth legible.

That is creative work. It just looks terrible on a mood board.

A good funnel model is a narrative. It says: this is how attention becomes interest, how interest becomes qualification, how qualification becomes sales motion, how sales motion becomes pipeline, how pipeline becomes revenue, and where the whole thing leaks like an old roof.

A good dashboard is an argument. It says: these are the numbers that matter, these are the definitions behind them, this is what changed, this is where we are lying to ourselves.

A good spreadsheet is sometimes a tiny constitution. Everyone agrees to live inside the same definitions for long enough to govern the work.

The problem is that spreadsheets have terrible branding. They look like punishment. They feel like homework. They attract the kind of person who says "single source of truth" and then creates 9 tabs named Final, Final 2, Final Reviewed, Final FINAL, and Archive Do Not Use.

I have been that person. I am working on it.

But there is a dignity in the work when it is done right. It takes the invisible mess of a business and gives people something they can inspect together. It gives marketing a way to stop pleading for credit. It gives sales a way to stop relying on vibes. It gives finance a way to evaluate investment without treating every marketing claim like a magic trick.

The spreadsheet guy is not the hero. Please, God, no.

The spreadsheet guy is the person trying to make the business less dependent on folklore.

I still love the visible work. I still care about the sentence, the story, the design, the strange emotional physics of why one phrase lands and another dies on contact.

But I have learned that the story gets stronger when the machinery underneath it holds.

So yes, I became a spreadsheet guy.

There are worse fates.

At least mine has conditional formatting.