Business
Pablo Gerboles Parrilla’s Record of Zero Late Deliveries
Large technology projects have a well-documented habit of running long and over budget. Research from McKinsey and the University of Oxford covering more than 5,400 large IT projects found that they ran 45% over budget on average and delivered 56% less value than predicted, with software projects facing the greatest exposure to cost and schedule overruns.
Why Late Software Delivery Is Treated as Normal
Those numbers have been cited for years, and the industry has largely made peace with them. Clients pad their timelines, agencies pad their estimates and both sides privately assume the launch date will move at least once. According to the McKinsey and Oxford research, roughly 17% of IT projects go so badly that budget overruns exceed 200%, a level that can threaten the survival of the company paying for them.
Against that backdrop, one claim from Pablo Gerboles Parrilla stands out. Asked about client projects that nearly failed, he answered that his companies have never failed or delivered late on a single project. The more useful question for other founders is what makes a record like that possible.
On-Time Project Delivery Starts With the Projects You Accept
The first answer sits upstream of any project management software or sprint planning. Gerboles Parrilla has said his companies practice selective client intake, taking on only the work they can commit to fully and only ideas they believe in. That filter removes a large share of delivery risk before any contract is signed.
Many late projects were doomed at the proposal stage. The scope was vague, the client’s goals were unclear or the team lacked the specific experience the work required. Turning down that work costs revenue in the short term. Accepting it tends to cost far more, in missed deadlines, strained relationships and reputational damage that follows a company into its next sales conversation.
Growing at the Pace Quality Allows
The second answer is about capacity. At one point, Gerboles Parrilla’s business was receiving far more client applications than it could handle well. He could have accepted everyone and outsourced the extra work for a commission. He chose instead to slow down, focus on existing clients and avoid aggressive hiring until he felt ready to manage a larger team.
He explained his reasoning in practical terms: he was not confident that other providers would deliver the same quality and attention, and a single bad client experience could damage the reputation he had built. That decision reflects a line he has used to describe his approach to growth: “Stay small long enough to become big enough.” Overloaded teams are one of the most reliable causes of missed deadlines, and the surest way to avoid overload is to refuse work that would create it.
Small Mistakes Compound in Long Projects
Gerboles Parrilla’s background as a competitive golfer shapes how he thinks about risk across a long engagement. “In golf, you’re playing a long game, every decision matters, and the smallest mistakes can compound. Startups are the same,” he has said.
Software projects follow the same arithmetic. A requirement left ambiguous in week two becomes a rework cycle in week eight. A dependency nobody tracked becomes a blocked release in the final month. Most late projects are the sum of dozens of small slips that nobody treated as urgent when they happened, rather than a single dramatic failure.
Understanding the Work Before Delegating It
A third factor is how closely a founder understands the work being delivered. Gerboles Parrilla has said he tries to understand how every moving part of each of his companies interacts, so he can connect the dots, spot risks early and hire the right people. Being the strongest engineer on a project matters less to him than knowing enough to recognize when an estimate is unrealistic or a plan is missing a step.
Founders who delegate delivery completely often learn about problems only when a deadline has already passed. Those who stay close enough to ask informed questions can catch the early signals, and that proximity is a large part of software delivery management done well.
Transparency When Circumstances Change
A clean delivery record does not mean nothing ever goes wrong. External events, from cloud outages to shifting client priorities, will always intrude. What protects the relationship in those moments is honesty about tradeoffs and constraints before they become surprises.
Gerboles Parrilla’s teams have maintained client trust through exactly that kind of transparency. When clients understand the choices behind a plan, including the ones made to fit a budget, they are far more likely to stay patient when conditions change.
A Delivery Standard Any Service Business Can Adopt
A perfect on-time record is rare, and most service businesses will never claim one. The practices behind it are available to anyone: accept only work the team is equipped to deliver, grow no faster than quality allows, treat small slips as serious and keep founders close enough to the work to notice problems early.
For Gerboles Parrilla, those habits are the foundation of the delivery record he describes. For other founders, the most practical first step may be the simplest one. Before signing the next client, ask honestly whether the team can deliver that project on time, and walk away when the answer isno.
