I understand the instinct completely.
You’ve been shown a solution. It looks like a spreadsheet. Maybe it has some formulas, a few dropdown menus, a button or two.
And somewhere in the back of your mind, a thought forms:
“My nephew could build that in a weekend.”
I don’t take offence at that thought. I’ve heard it many times. And honestly — on the surface — it’s not an unreasonable one.
But before you hand it to the nephew, consider this:
The big consulting firms do exactly the same thing.
You’ve seen how it works. A senior partner from PwC, KPMG, or Boston Consulting walks into your boardroom. Impressive credentials. Grey hair. Decades of experience. They ask the right questions. They understand your business almost immediately.
You sign the engagement.
Then someone else shows up to do the work.
They’re twenty-two years old. They’ve been in the workforce for eleven months. They have never seen a business from the inside — not really. They couldn’t tell you what a balance sheet reveals about a company’s health. They’ve never tried to reconcile a general ledger at month end. They’ve never sat with a sales team trying to hit a number with broken tools.
But they’re bright. And they’re cheap. And the senior partner’s name is still on the report.
You paid for the grey hair. You got the graduate.
The nephew is the same equation — just without the letterhead.
Here’s what experience actually buys you.
It isn’t the ability to write a formula. Anyone can learn a formula.
It’s knowing which formula to write — and more importantly, which problem it’s actually solving.
It’s the difference between someone who has built quoting systems, pricing models, and reporting tools across dozens of businesses in a dozen industries — and someone who is building their first one in yours.
In my case, that’s forty-one years of difference.
→ Knowing that a pricing tool without a margin floor is a liability, not an asset.
→ Knowing that a report that looks right can still be wrong — and where to check.
→ Knowing that the process the client describes in week one is rarely the process that actually needs solving.
→ Knowing what questions to ask before a single line of code is written.
The nephew doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. That’s not a criticism — it’s simply where he is. The problem is that in your business, what he doesn’t know has a cost.
A tool built without context doesn’t just fail to solve the problem. It creates new ones.
The real cost of cheap.
I’ve walked into businesses where a well-meaning internal resource — or a junior hire, or a nephew — has built something that technically works.
It runs. It produces a number. Everyone uses it.
And nobody has checked whether that number is right for three years.
By the time I arrive, the cost of that unchecked number is embedded in hundreds of decisions. Pricing decisions. Margin decisions. Hiring decisions. Strategy decisions built on a foundation that was never solid.
That is what cheap actually costs.
What I’ve seen in over 40 years of consulting:
The businesses that get the best results from process automation are not the ones who spent the least to build it. They’re the ones who invested in having it built correctly — once — by someone who’d seen the same problem enough times to know exactly where it goes wrong.
——
If the nephew builds it and it works perfectly — that’s a wonderful outcome. I mean that sincerely.
But if you’d like to know what it should look like before he starts — or if he’s already built something and you’re not entirely sure you can trust it — that’s exactly what a Process Audit is for.
Ten minutes is usually enough to know whether what you have is solid, or whether the foundation needs work.
calendly.com/jurgen139/priority
P.S. The senior partner who walked into your boardroom didn’t get to where they are by building things quickly. They got there by building things correctly, enough times, that they stopped making the mistakes that cost businesses money. That’s not a weekend. That’s a career.