He called me because his second-in-command had seen my work at her previous employer.
He was a founder. Early days of what was then a promising startup — the kind of business that has energy and momentum but not yet the systems to match.
He was also furious.
Sixty thousand dollars had gone into a CRM implementation that had stalled completely. The vendor was still talking. The system still wasn’t working. And he was seriously considering legal action to claw the money back.
I let him finish. Then I said the thing he didn’t want to hear.
“The $60,000 is gone. You’re not getting it back — not from the courts, not from the vendor. The question is what you do with what you’ve learned.”
Sunk cost is the most dangerous number in business.
The instinct when a large investment fails is to double down — to justify the original decision by continuing on the same path. To sue. To escalate. To find someone who can finally make the thing work.
It’s understandable. It’s also almost always wrong.
The $60,000 was already teaching him something invaluable: exactly what his business didn’t need. Every failed implementation is a detailed specification of what the real solution should look like — if you’re willing to read it that way.
I proposed something different.
We start again. From scratch. With a simple, hands-on Excel solution — built quickly, built practically, built around what the business actually did rather than what a vendor’s sales team had imagined it might need.
Not another $60,000. Not another twelve-month implementation. Something that worked on day one and could be amended as the business grew and as he learned what he truly needed.
We would take the $60,000 education and build the right answer — instead of throwing more money at the wrong one.
He agreed. We built it. It worked.
The Excel CRM did exactly what his business needed. It was fast, it was flexible, and every time something changed — every time he discovered a new requirement or a better way of working — we adapted it. No vendor contract. No change request process. No waiting.
Two years later, the business had grown to the point where Salesforce made sense. And here’s the part that matters:
When we implemented Salesforce, we knew exactly what to ask for.
Not what a consultant told us we needed. Not what the vendor’s standard configuration assumed. What this specific business, with this specific team, running these specific processes, actually required.
The implementation was smooth. The adoption was fast. The outcome was everything the original $60,000 investment had promised — and failed to deliver.
That startup is now a billion-dollar enterprise. Still operating out of Sydney. Still going from strength to strength.
The lesson isn’t “don’t buy software.”
Enterprise software has its place. Salesforce, SAP, whatever the right platform is for a business at the right stage — these are legitimate tools for legitimate problems.
The lesson is: “Don’t Buy Software That Doesn’t Fit”
And the only reliable way to know what you need is to run the business first — with something simple, something flexible, something that lets you learn without locking you in.
Excel is that tool. Not because it’s cheap. Because it’s honest.
It shows you exactly what your process is. It doesn’t hide complexity behind a user interface or paper over a broken workflow with a feature. It makes you confront the reality of how your business actually operates — and then it gives you the tools to build something better.
Whiteboard before keyboard. Simple before sophisticated. Learn before you lock in.
What I’ve seen in over 40 years of consulting:
The businesses that make the best technology decisions are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones that understood their own processes before they went shopping.
The ones who bought first and learned later paid twice — once for the software that didn’t fit, and once for the solution that finally did.
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If you’re looking at a software implementation — or if you’ve already been through one that didn’t deliver — it’s worth a conversation before the next decision gets made.
A 10-minute call is usually enough to work out whether you’re ready for the platform you’re considering, or whether there’s a smarter first step.
→ Book a Priority Call: calendly.com/jurgen139/priority
P.S. The founder never did sue the vendor. He told me years later it was the best decision he didn’t make. The energy that would have gone into litigation went into building the business instead. The rest, as they say, is history.