Point of View · Q3 2026

The Consultant and the Spreadsheet

Ask a mid-market CEO how value creation is run and the honest answer is rarely a platform. It is a trusted advisor, a monthly call, and an Excel file named final_v7. This is our real competitor, and it deserves a serious answer, because it half-works.

Why it half-works

The advisor knows the company. The spreadsheet bends to any question. The monthly call creates rhythm. For €50,000 to €150,000 a year this arrangement produces real judgment, and any vendor who sneers at it has never sat in the room where it operates.

Where it quietly fails

The method lives in one head, so it leaves when the advisor does. The spreadsheet has no memory: last year’s assumptions are overwritten, not preserved, so nobody can prove what was predicted and what came true. Nothing is signed, so at diligence the whole record is testimony. And the formulas were never published, so every number is an argument waiting to happen. The arrangement produces judgment but not a record, and companies are sold on records.

What an operating system changes

Keep the advisor, keep the rhythm. Replace the spreadsheet with a machine the company owns: formulas published inside it, every answer graded by the evidence behind it, every prediction frozen on the day it was made, every realised euro signed by a named person and cryptographically sealed in the company’s own browser. The judgment stays human. The record becomes arithmetic. Three years later, the difference is a board slide no adviser can produce alone: predicted against realised, signed, dated, and priced.

The test to run on your own setup

Ask three questions of your current arrangement. Can we prove today what we predicted two years ago? If our advisor left this month, what stays? Would a buyer’s diligence team accept our record as evidence, or re-derive everything from scratch? If any answer is uncomfortable, the spreadsheet is costing more than the platform it saved you from buying.