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Misty Ebersole spent close to fifteen years trying to replace a 1990s Visual Basic database. We rebuilt it in under a year, and shipped 30% of her team’s day back to them in the first eighteen days.
SASS is the worldwide rule-setting body for cowboy action shooting and wild bunch action shooting. Founded in 1986. They issue 115,000-plus memberships across 500-plus affiliated clubs, sanction national events, and certify the gear and ranges that members use to compete.
Misty Ebersole joined the organization in 2009, became CEO around 2012, and became sole owner in 2020 when the founding board retired.
SASS had been running on a Visual Basic membership database built in the early 1990s by an early member who happened to be a Silicon Valley legend. Over the years, parts of it stopped working. The only way to pull data out was through Crystal Reports, into Excel, and then into whatever needed it next. Member-facing letters required going back to the original developer and waiting weeks for changes.
Misty had spent close to fifteen years trying to fix it. Off-the-shelf membership platforms didn’t fit the niche. Offshore developers couldn’t understand the business. Sales cycles dragged six months and ended in it can’t meet our non-negotiables. The result was an organization running 115,000 memberships on a system nobody could safely change.
“I’m an educated woman. I run a multi-million dollar company. I’m very efficient. But I don’t understand the jargon. I know what I need to do, but I can’t tell you what you need to do to get it to do that.”
— Misty Ebersole, CEO · SASS
The first thing we did wasn’t building. It was looking at how the existing database was housed. Within a few weeks we discovered it hadn’t been backed up in years and had a setting that would have deleted everything if the host machine was ever powered off.
We stopped development and migrated forty years of data to AWS. Several months passed before we wrote a line of new code. Misty later said this was the moment she knew we weren’t there to sell software and walk away.
“You prioritized the stability of my company’s information over selling me the new software build. Adam said, ‘let’s get this secure before we do anything else.’”
— Misty Ebersole, CEO · SASS
Once the data was safe, we built a new system from scratch around the actual SASS workflow. Membership management, club affiliations, sanctioned events, honors and certifications, products, and merchandise all live in one application now, reachable by staff without the round-trip through Crystal Reports and Excel.
The build was scoped tight to phase-one fundamentals: the day-to-day operations Misty and her team needed to be functional. The foundation was designed to support a phase two that’s now in motion.
The new system launched in September 2025. Eighteen days later, SASS staff were saving an average of 30% of their day on tedious data entry tasks that used to take hours. Reports that took eight hours now take fifteen minutes.
We pushed the launch back a week or two when Misty’s internal team needed more time, not because we weren’t ready. Phase two is in active development.
“They made us feel valued and respected, with the intention of building a lasting partnership rather than just collecting a paycheck.”
— Misty Ebersole, CEO · SASS
We meet with Misty often to fine-tune what’s live and to scope what’s next. Phase two is in active development now, building on the foundation we laid in 2024 and 2025.
A long-form conversation between Misty Ebersole and Jake Haynes, recorded for the Pilot West podcast.