Bowled last night and checked my real-time dashboard between frames. Still kind of can’t believe I built the thing in an afternoon.
Here’s the backstory and why I think it matters for how you run your firm.
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## The Five-Hour Build
When I decided to get serious about league bowling, the first thing I did was what any data-obsessed CPA would do: I built a tracking system.
It took about five hours. Configuring Airtable bases. Mapping forms in Fillout. Troubleshooting the links between them. It worked. It helped me improve. But it was a brick-by-brick build, the kind where you spend more time on the infrastructure than the actual thing you’re trying to do.
Sound familiar?
Last week, I rebuilt it from scratch using AI. Not tweaked it. *Rebuilt it from scratch.*
I had the bones up in 15 minutes. Two more hours and $20 in API credits later, I had a fully functional app with real-time dashboards giving me insights while I’m still at the lanes. Roughly 5x better than the original. And I used it last night.
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## Here’s the Thing Though
The bowling app isn’t really the point.
I did this intentionally as a sandbox; low stakes, personal project, zero client risk. (If the app crashes, I just bowl.) What I actually wanted to know was: what can these tools *really* do when you give them a real problem?
The answer was a little humbling, honestly.
Because what I found wasn’t just that AI made me faster. It was that the *cost of trying something* dropped to almost nothing. I had an idea on a Tuesday. By Thursday I was using it at the lanes. No budget approval. No IT ticket. No three-week implementation. Just: idea, build, test, use.
That’s new. And I don’t think enough firms are paying attention to what it means.
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## The Real Problem: Experimentation Has Always Been Expensive
Think about how your firm has historically tested anything new.
New pricing model? You probably talked about it for six months before trying it with one client. New service offering? Someone had to build the whole thing before you could sell it. New internal workflow? That’s a team meeting, a pilot, a debrief, and another meeting to decide if it worked.
None of that is wrong, by the way. When experimentation is expensive, in time, money, and risk, you *should* be careful about what you try. The cost of a failed experiment used to be real.
But here’s what’s changing: that cost is collapsing.
Not to zero. (I did say I had the *bones* up in 15 minutes, I kept tweaking it; gotta stay honest about that.) But close enough to zero that the old calculus doesn’t hold anymore. The question is no longer “can we afford to try this?” It’s “why haven’t we tried this yet?”
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## What a Sandbox Actually Is
A sandbox is just a low-stakes environment where the cost of failure is acceptable.
For me, it’s bowling. If the app breaks mid-game, I pick up my ball and throw it anyway. Nobody gets hurt. No client loses confidence. No invoice goes out wrong. I just learn something cheap and fast.
For your firm, a sandbox might look like:
– Testing a new client onboarding process with one new client before rolling it out
– Trying a different pricing structure on a single engagement to see how it lands
– Building a simple internal tool for one team member before investing in a firm-wide solution
– Using AI to draft a first pass at something you normally spend two hours on and seeing how close it gets
The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is information. Fast, cheap information that tells you whether something is worth pursuing for real.
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## The Firms That Will Win Are Already Playing
Here’s what I keep coming back to: the professional services firms that are going to pull ahead over the next few years aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tech stacks.
They’re the ones where *someone* is spending Tuesday nights building bowling apps.
Not because bowling matters. Because the habit of low-stakes experimentation — trying things, learning fast, iterating without fear, is the muscle that’s going to matter most when the next tool, the next workflow, the next client expectation shows up and you have to adapt quickly.
That muscle doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. But I promise you, you can feel the difference between firms that have it and firms that don’t.
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## So What’s Your Sandbox?
I’m not saying everyone needs to build a bowling app. (Though honestly, it’s been great for my game.)
I’m saying: what’s the low-stakes project where you could try something new without it mattering too much if it doesn’t work? What’s the thing you’ve been meaning to test but haven’t because it felt too risky or too time-consuming?
Because if the answer is “I don’t have one”, that’s worth paying attention to.
The cost of experimenting just got a lot cheaper. The only question is whether you’re taking advantage of it.
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*Chris Geno is a CPA and fractional Controller and CFO advisor at High Rock Accounting, where he works with professional services firms on financial strategy, reporting, and operations. He also bowls on Wednesdays.*
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