The apprentice is doing your wiring
Imagine having your house rewired. The master electrician’s firm comes for the initial consultation, makes a competent impression, you sign. On Monday the apprentice stands alone in front of your breaker panel. The master will take a look on Friday, remotely.
In the trades, unthinkable. In CRM consulting, it’s the business model.
The model is called junior leverage and works like this: the senior sells the project and afterwards appears in steering committees. The actual work in your system is done by people who got their degree 18 months ago and whose day rate is billed in four figures anyway. The margin lives on exactly that difference. For the consultancy it’s rational. For your system it’s a risk that you also get to pay for.
Because a production system is not a practice range. Someone who has never debugged an automation that sent out 4,000 wrong emails at three in the morning builds differently. Someone who has never watched a careless field update trigger an integration chain that duplicates invoices thinks in happy paths. That experience appears in no certificate. It comes into existence one way only: by having broken things and repaired them yourself. Not escalated, not passed on to the next ticket. Repaired yourself, with sweaty hands, while sales can’t work.
That’s the real qualification question, and it never comes up in a pitch. Reference logos tell you which customers the firm has won. They don’t tell you who logs into your system.
Seniority in the system beats headcount in the deck. One person with ten years of wrench time solves in two days what two juniors need two weeks for, and leaves no new construction sites behind. That pays off even at double the day rate, because you’re not buying time, you’re buying the absence of consequential damage. The most expensive consultancy is the one whose mistakes you pay someone else to rip out two years later.
So on the next proposal, don’t ask how many people the firm has. Ask who specifically will work in your system, how many years that person has been touching production systems, and what their biggest self-inflicted outage was. Whoever has no story for the last question has either never built anything or is lying.
Would you hand the apprentice your breaker panel alone? Your CRM carries more revenue than your wiring.
