The company
On July 5, 2005, John Lyons declared his independence from a career in corporate banking and bought a small environmental lab focused on drinking water testing: Granite State Analytical Services, LLC. He saw a path to growth, but growth in the lab business runs through data - a lab isn't just selling test results, it's selling consistent, quality data delivered in a report format every customer can actually use. Fortunately, the lab's prior owner had already secured exactly that: a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) built by Ewarenow.
Many of Granite State's clients were repeat customers with their own specific testing needs, so a database that automated data input - and, just as importantly, automated the report content in a repeatable way - meant efficient, accurate data management at scale. As Lyons put it, the lab was in the data management and reporting business every bit as much as it was in the testing business. And as the years went on, customer data requirements only got more complicated. Being able to respond to that with as little disruption as possible was the whole game.
- LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) - the software a lab uses to track samples, run reports, and manage the data behind every test result it issues.
- Regulatory import format - the specific file structure a state or federal agency requires labs to submit results in, which can differ by agency and change over time.
For a lab, the LIMS isn't a back-office system - it's the product. Every customer relationship depends on getting the right data, in the right format, on time, every time a sample comes back from the bench. Get that wrong even occasionally and a lab starts looking unreliable to exactly the customers it can least afford to lose.
Twenty years of a moving target
Ewarenow delivered that responsiveness with the expediency and affordability a growing company actually needs - not a slow enterprise-software relationship, but a working partnership. The LIMS stayed malleable: many changes and improvements were made over the years, built on strong collaboration and mutual respect between the lab's management and Ewarenow. Having a solutions-based database programmer on call, rather than a vendor to escalate tickets to, was a key ingredient in the lab's ability to grow at all.
The clearest example of that was Doug MacLean's introduction of the Quick Query tool - the direct ancestor of today's EQQ-Triangle. It let Granite State's own staff, not a programmer, create electronic data deliverables in whatever format a customer or a regulator actually needed. One recurring need was especially concrete: state agencies require lab data submitted in a specific import format, and Quick Query let the lab's staff build and reuse templates that pulled straight from the LIMS database into Excel, already formatted to meet that requirement exactly.
"Ewarenow Quick Query is everything I wanted and more at an affordable price… I wanted a way for my staff to create and use templates to extract data from our LIMS database to Excel. Ewarenow delivered."
That need for fast, reformattable exports didn't stay small. As Lyons described it, "the need skyrocketed" over the 20 years he owned the lab - everyone in the industry was automating, and the labs that could keep up with rising data-reporting demands were the ones that survived and grew.
The outcome
These tools were central to Granite State's growth, both in order volume and in the range of testing capabilities the lab could offer, over those two decades. What started as a six-employee, single-location operation grew into a sixty-employee business spanning three states, with comprehensive laboratory testing and data-reporting capabilities to match. Sales grew more than tenfold over that period, while the lab held onto strong profit margins the entire way - growth that didn't come at the cost of the business's underlying health.
"A former boss of mine once told me that every business owner needs a good lawyer, a good accountant and a good banker. In the lab business, I would add a good database programmer to that list, and I was fortunate to have Doug and his team."
Lyons worked with Doug MacLean and Ewarenow for 15 years, and was direct about what that partnership meant to him: "I love working with Doug MacLean and Ewarenow! Instead of peddling the flavor of the month, Doug listens to my business needs, makes a great effort to understand them, and then customizes a solution or upgrade that directly addresses those needs."
Why it still matters today
Granite State's story is really a story about who gets to ask questions of a company's own data. Lyons wasn't a database programmer, and neither were the staff building state-agency import templates - but the LIMS held the answers they needed, and Quick Query was the bridge between the two. EQQ-Triangle carries that same idea forward today: a read-only, installed, no-SQL query tool that connects directly to your PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MS SQL database and lets your own people - lab technicians, account managers, whoever actually needs the answer - build and reuse their own exports to Excel, CSV, JSON, or PDF. For a lab business where regulatory reporting formats and customer requirements never stop changing, that's not a convenience. It's the difference between a data bottleneck and twenty years of 10X growth.
The same pattern shows up across analytical labs, testing services, and any regulated data-reporting business: growth doesn't just mean more samples, it means more variety in what each customer or agency needs back, and how fast. A LIMS that only a programmer can query becomes a bottleneck the moment that variety grows past what a small internal team can script by hand. Granite State never hit that ceiling, because the people closest to the customer requirement - not a developer three tickets deep in a queue - could build the export themselves. That is the same capability EQQ-Triangle puts in front of any lab, clinic, or data-heavy business today.