The Self-Build Trap: Why Your Power Platform Project Is Probably Failing
The pattern is the same everywhere: honeymoon, complexity, runaway budget, burnout. Healthcare spent billions learning this lesson. Financial advice is learning it now.
The appeal of building your own technology is entirely understandable. You know your business better than anyone. Off-the-shelf software never quite fits. So you start building. In the early days, it feels like a revelation. A paraplanner who is good with computers builds a workflow in Power Automate. Someone creates a client dashboard in Power Apps. Each piece solves a real problem. This is the honeymoon period. It typically lasts one to two years. Then the problems begin. That clever workflow needs to handle edge cases. The dashboard needs to talk to your back-office system. The portal needs to be secure, accessible, and actually pleasant to use. The person who built it gets pulled into maintaining it, then extending it, then fixing it when it breaks. Before long, you have people whose job was supposed to be financial planning spending significant portions of their time maintaining technology. The budget for external consultants grows. Licence costs for the underlying platform accumulate. The technology starts to show its limitations. This pattern has played out across every professional services industry. The NHS spent ten billion pounds over nine years building a custom health records system before abandoning it. The US Veterans Health Administration spent over twenty-five billion dollars on their custom VistA system. Law firms like Clifford Chance and DLA Piper, with budgets that dwarf anything in financial advice, abandoned custom development in favour of commercial platforms. If they could not make it work, it is worth asking what makes an advice firm with fifty people think it can. The iceberg model of software costs is the key insight: building the system is only 20-25% of the total cost. The remaining 75-80% is maintenance — bugs, changing requirements, integrations, security patches, regulatory changes. When a technology vendor quotes you a subscription fee, those costs are already baked in. When you build your own, every single one of them is your problem.