A client took the idea and built it without me

Earlier this year I spent a run of long conversations with a client in the energy sector about their numbers: what they were sitting on, what it could tell them, and what we might build so it told them without a person in the middle. Then it went quiet for a few months. We caught up this week. They have built the lot themselves, in house, and it is further on than the thing I had in my head.

What they built

The way he described it, the question changed on them. They had started out asking how to pull their data together. Somewhere in those conversations it turned into a better question, which was what the data actually tells us, and is that the right call when we look at it through this lens or that one. They kept building on the question, and now they are asking whether the whole set of tools becomes the backbone of the business.

He showed me a piece of it. You give it a town or a postcode, it finds the site, measures it, asks you a handful of questions about what you want to put there and how high you can stack it, and then draws the scheme with the loads and the payback attached. The proposal falls out of the other end. Six months ago that was a conversation about joining up spreadsheets.

The bit I got wrong

I had quietly assumed the build would come to me. It did not. He was generous about it on the call and said the seeds were mine, which is a nice thing to hear and does not pay anybody. Two things are true at once. I now have a client who understands this work properly, describes it in his own words, and will say so to other people in his industry. I also did not get the build. Only one of those is income.

The lesson is not that I should have been more protective about ideas. Ideas are not the scarce thing and never were. The lesson is that I should have asked, out loud, months earlier, whether they wanted a partner to build it or a push to go and do it themselves. Both are a fine answer. Not knowing which one you are in is the expensive part, because you plan your year around the wrong one.

The thing they got right

What struck me most was how careful they were being. His phrase for it was ask it, tell it, correct it, then build on the block, and repeat. Plenty of people in the business wanted to let the whole thing run wild and free. A small group insisted on going stage by stage and validating each stage before moving on, including the assumptions and the costs and the returns, because not all the data they feed it is right in the first place.

That is the part almost everybody skips. If you ask one of these tools a question that has no defined answer, it will decide an answer is the answer, convince itself, then convince you. You do not want it carrying one of your own errors forward into a hundred proposals. So you check its homework while it is still small enough to check.

If you talk to enough owners about their own operation, some of them will go away and do it without you. I would rather have sown it than not. But a business does not run on seeds, so I ask the question earlier now.