Your ERP Consultant Hasn't Bled Enough

I took down an entire business during a management meeting.

It was early in my career, back when SQL Query Analyzer was the primary tool for database work. I was running mitigation scripts daily, keeping a legacy system alive while we bought time for a rewrite.

One day, management called me into an urgent meeting. The system might have lost the company money, and they needed me to find it.

I got up from my desk like a boss and walked into that conference room.

Ten minutes in, shadows started running past the frosted glass. Someone poked their head in: "All systems are down! Emergency situation!"

I returned to my desk and closed my Query Analyzer window.

The problem vanished.

I'd locked several key tables with an implicit transaction and walked away. The entire business ground to a halt because I didn't know what I didn't know.

That's when I learned: experience isn't about being smart. It's about having bled.

Pattern Recognition Through Scar Tissue

Years later, a customer called me in after their consultant spent weeks stuck on a truck scale integration. The new scale-head wouldn't talk to the computer over the RS232 port.

I quoted a week of work, figuring I'd need time to run through my "Idiot Check List" of basics.

I looked at the code. Buffer set to 1024 characters. Standard default.

"Is it on continuous or prompt?" I asked.

"Prompt," the consultant said.

"Change the buffer from 1024 to 1."

He argued about losing characters. I explained it wasn't the hardware buffer, just the trigger level to drain it.

He humored me. Compiled. Ran the code.

The weight popped up instantly.

I couldn't bill them for the week. I charged travel time only.

I didn't know that answer because I was smarter than that consultant. I knew it because I was once that guy.

Experience is the wisdom you earn that allows you to see a mistake when you see it again. It's not a measure of skill.

The Dangerous Certainty of Young Blood

You can spot inexperienced consultants immediately. They speak declaratively.

Not just confidently. In absolutes.

They leave no room for interpretation, no space for the possibility they might be wrong. "If you set config X to Y, it'll never do that again."

That word: "never."

Seasoned consultants never say never. We've been burned too many times by software versions that behave slightly differently, by edge cases we didn't anticipate, by the universe's infinite creativity in breaking things.

Today's certainty becomes tomorrow's hubris.

The numbers tell the story. ERP implementations fail at rates between 50-75%. Only 23% are considered successful.

This isn't a technical problem. People issues are the most important factor in ERP implementation success or failure.

Battle-tested consultants know this instinctively. We've lived through the disasters that teach you to prioritize doing no harm, even in the pursuit of helping.

What Battle Scars Actually Buy You

When projects cost millions and overrun budgets by an average of 189%, you can't afford consultants who haven't bled.

The consultant who spent weeks on that buffer issue? He had knowledge. He knew the technical specs, the API documentation, the theory.

What he lacked was the pattern recognition that comes from having made that exact mistake yourself. From having stayed up until 3 AM debugging a similar issue. From having felt the sick realization that you've been chasing the wrong problem for days.

That's what bleeding teaches you.

My Customer Journey Framework exists because of 35 years of these moments. It encodes the hard-won wisdom of what actually matters across 10 phases of digital transformation projects.

Not what the manual says matters. What bleeding taught me matters.

When you're selecting implementation partners, ask them about their failures. Push them to tell you about the time they took down a production system. The project that went sideways despite their best efforts.

If they speak in absolutes, if they've never made a catastrophic mistake, if they project certainty instead of earned confidence, walk away.

Your million-dollar implementation deserves consultants who've already paid the tuition of experience.

The ones who've bled enough to know better.