You're not buying software. You're buying back your time.

I'll be blunt, because it's a subject that fascinates me and almost nobody talks about it. Web applications, business software, the tools that keep a company running: in France, they're massively neglected. Underused. And it's not out of stupidity. It's out of habit.

A habit left over from a time when all of it cost way too much.

The door that just opened

For years, having software built was a luxury. A developer costs between six hundred and a thousand euros a day. Do the math over a week, over a month. For most companies, the question didn't even come up: it was reserved for outfits with enormous budgets.

So everyone shut that door on themselves. We kept going with Excel files, handwritten sheets, workarounds. Yet every company has processes. Roles, employees, tasks to get done, every single day. That's the very definition of a company: without processes, you don't have a business, you have a job. It's not a criticism, I come back to it below, and I'm in the exact same boat as you.

What changed is that this barrier disappeared. Plain and simple. Today, in a few hours, I do the work a developer used to spend a week producing. A change in a tool takes me two minutes, where it used to take a day. The reason is AI. And just like websites, it's no longer reserved for anyone: the tool is in everyone's hands. It's all on YouTube. What matters now isn't "is it possible," it's what you actually need.

Quick aside, because it says everything. For thirty years, the skill you put on a resume to work in a company was mastering the Office suite. Excel, above all. Today, that's already going out of date. Tomorrow, the skill you'll be asked for, the one you'll be looking for in your employees, will be knowing how to use these new tools. The world flipped, and fast.

The math nobody does

Let's take a simple case. You've got a task in your organization that costs an employee, say, three hours a week. A data entry, a follow-up, a report, something repetitive. Three hours sounds like nothing. Do the math anyway.

Because it's not just three hours. It's also mental load: you have to remember to do the task, not forget it, the pressure is there, it takes up headspace. And since it's manual, it's a risk: a missed entry, a typo, a wrong line that costs you later. Three hours lost, plus everything that comes with them.

Now put a number on it. Take the hourly rate of the employee handling it, multiply by three hours, by fifty-two weeks. There's the real cost of that task over a year. It's not an exact science, don't come after me, I'm just trying to make things concrete. But the number itself is very real.

A task that costs three hours a week, turned into five minutes by a tool paid for once: the question isn't whether it's expensive. It's how long it takes to pay for itself.

And you already apply this logic elsewhere without thinking. You have someone clean your premises at twenty euros an hour, because your own hour is worth fifty. It's not contempt, it's common sense: your time is more valuable elsewhere. A custom tool works exactly the same way. With one difference: you don't pay someone every month, you build once a thing that then works for you, with no recurring bill.

The chef or the fast food

Here a clarification is in order, because a lot of you already handle some things with off-the-shelf software. Booking tools, scheduling, management. Am I telling you to throw them out? No. Let's stay pragmatic.

SaaS is fast food

This subscription software, with its modules billed by the month, is fast food. And I say it without contempt: fast food feeds you, it's quick, it's calibrated for the majority. It satisfies what most people need. If yours does the job and you're happy with it, keep it. Honestly.

The catch is that we all have, in our trade, a quirk. A detail that's ours alone. And the standard software doesn't know about it. So we tinker. We work around it, we find tricks, we add an Excel file on the side that we try to keep up to date. That time lost patching up the tool, that's the real signal.

Custom is a chef

On the other side, custom is a kitchen made for you. It fits exactly how you work, with nothing useless. With one of my clients, we built close to ten applications. Each one handles a specific role, solves a specific problem. The minimum every time, nothing more. And the budget for the whole thing has nothing to do with what we used to imagine, precisely because the barrier is gone.

Excel is a time bomb

And if you're still running whole parts of your business on Excel files, you need to be aware of it: you're taking a risk every day. A shared file that three people edit at the same time eventually breaks. A badly entered value spreads. A workbook gets lost.

Think back to before. We wrote on sheets of paper. Paper disappears. The floppy disks, the CDs, the backups of an era could wipe overnight, and everything went with them. Today, with sync, the cloud, multiple backups, you never lose a file again. It's progress we take for granted. Keeping on running your company on cobbled-together spreadsheets, with no process or tool, is staying in the paper age while the house next door has already put everything safe.

You're building tomorrow's foundations

When a company neglects all this, its owner becomes the slave of their own admin. Everything depends on their time, their memory, their mistakes. The day they stop, everything stops. On the flip side, when you put real tools in place, digitize your processes, you lay foundations. And those foundations are worth gold, for two reasons.

Because tomorrow plugs into today

Everything you organize and digitize now becomes the base everything else will connect to. Your data tidy, your processes in place: tomorrow, plugging an artificial intelligence on top to steer, forecast, automate even more, will be almost instant. Those who prepared nothing will start from scratch. You'll just have to connect. It's the useful thing you sow today that gets harvested later.

Because it makes your company's value

Ask yourself a real question: how much is your company worth? Don't give me "three times, five times profit," I know the tune, and it's not reality. Your company's value is exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. Nothing else.

And the reality is that a lot of companies go for a symbolic one euro, or with vendor credit, financing schemes, for lack of a buyer. Why? Because people don't willingly buy a gilded cage: an activity that only holds up because the owner is on it twenty-four hours a day. A buyer wants a business that runs on its own.

A company where everything is organized, where nothing depends on one head, doesn't sell for the same price as a job held together by hand. Processes are what turn your work into something that sells.

And I put myself in the same boat. I'm a craftsman, like you. We're all trying to optimize our processes to create value, to not just be someone who executes. The difference is that today it's finally within our reach, for almost nothing.

It's not a war against humans

I want to be clear on one point, because it worries everyone. Automating isn't cutting people. The value produced doesn't disappear, it moves. The person who spent their days answering the phone to note down appointments doesn't become useless: their time goes elsewhere, toward something more useful and, honestly, more interesting. Guiding a customer, solving a real problem, is worth more than copying out a calendar.

Besides, booking appointments, nobody does it by hand anymore: everyone moved to apps. We don't complain about it, we don't even wonder why anymore. That's exactly what's happening with everything else.

It takes some adjusting, that's true, I won't deny it. But it's the same shift as with the calculator, the computer, email. Tasks disappeared, jobs moved. Nobody would want to go back. Today, refusing accessible tools that save you time and money from the very first month is as absurd as sending a letter by post when you have email, or working out your sums by hand next to a calculator.

So no, this isn't a criticism. Everyone has their own goals, their pace, their situation, their means. There's nothing to judge. It's purely factual: the tools are here, they're accessible, and they've never been this accessible. Those who lay their foundations now are building a business. The others keep a job. Both are respectable. But one is getting ready for tomorrow, and the other isn't.

If this subject speaks to you and you don't know where to start, write to me. We'll look at where you stand, and I'll tell you what's genuinely worth it, no spin.