The $1,500 Chicken Sandwich

Why DIY systems feel cheap, eat your time, and keep your CPR business stuck at side‑hustle scale—SitRep #012

A guy once spent 6 months and $1,500 making a chicken sandwich from scratch.

Not “from scratch” like buying ingredients at the store.
Actually from scratch.

He planted wheat, harvested it by hand, and ground it into flour.
He milked a cow to make cheese and butter.
He flew to the ocean, collected seawater, and boiled it down for salt.
He grew vegetables, rendered oil from sunflowers, collected honey from bees, and finally killed a chicken himself.

Don’t get lost in the wrong field. Photo by Darla Hueske on Unsplash

Six months. $1,500. One sandwich.

His review?

“It’s not bad,” he said, laughing into his hands.

His friends were less polite: one said it tasted like “a corkboard dipped in lemon juice.”

The same sandwich would’ve cost $15 and taken 6 minutes at a restaurant.

Why did he do it?

He wanted to see the invisible complexity behind everyday things. To appreciate the “army of people” who specialize in each part so the rest of us can press a button and eat lunch.

Training providers do the opposite.

They’re not building everything themselves to learn. They’re doing it because they think DIY is cheaper. That they’ll “own it.” That it’s a competitive advantage.

What they actually own is technical debt, maintenance burden, and time they’re not spending on the business.

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You’re Already Paying for Infrastructure — You’re Just Not Counting It

The student experience has to happen. Every time. End to end:

• Marketing and listing your classes

• Booking and checkout

• Payment processing

• Delivering online materials

• Running the class

• Uploading rosters

• Following up with students and tracking expirations

Those steps exist whether you:

• Build custom systems

• Patch together tools manually

• Or use purpose-built infrastructure

The question is not “Do I spend money on this?”
The question is: “Am I being honest about how much it costs me?”

Most training providers aren’t.

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Three Kinds of $1,500 Chicken Sandwiches (They’re All Expensive)

Light DIY: Acuity + Mailchimp + Spreadsheets

You’re using generic booking software, email tools, an industry portal for codes, and a mess of spreadsheets and shared drives to glue it all together.

You pay with time:

• 10+ hours a week running the student experience end to end

• Building one-off landing pages

• Tracking expirations in spreadsheets

• Sending renewal reminders manually

• Managing student files across folders and drives

It feels cheap because the software line items are small.

But you’re spending 10+ hours a week on infrastructure instead of selling.

You’re still growing your own wheat.

Medium DIY: Legacy Platform + Custom Development

You’re on a 10+ year old platform that is “highly configurable.”

So you:

• Dial up your own student experience with email-only workflows

• Hand-build every email and campaign

• Try to corral the platform’s configurability when you try to build a real network

You pay with headcount:

• A team of admins babysitting everything on the back end

• Manual processes to track business billing and staff

• Custom websites to aggregate network availability

“We have staff for that” sounds like a solution.

It’s actually an expensive chicken sandwich with employees.

(At the network level, this is the “free logins ≠ infrastructure” problem from SitRep #010.)

You’re still growing your own wheat.

Heavy DIY: Building Proprietary Software

This is where people really get stuck.

You start out trying to build your own platform. Maybe you’ll code it with AI. Maybe you’ll hire a dev shop. In your head it’s easy to build, and you get to “own it.”

You’re actually trying to become a software company.

You pay with code:

• 5–6 figures in initial development

• Ongoing bug fixes, feature requests, and rebuilds

• Starting over every time the original dev disappears or the stack ages out

You think it’s a competitive advantage.

Meanwhile, your smaller competitor pays $160/month for 100 students, gets full lifecycle management, and spends their time selling instead of maintaining code.

All three paths feel different.
They all end in the same place:

You’re hand-growing the ingredients for a sandwich you could have bought off the shelf.

And in every version, you’re not just paying with time and money. You’re giving up the compounding benefits of shared infrastructure:

• Best practices built in once and updated for everyone

• Bugs found and fixed by the whole network, not just you

• Features shaped by thousands of classes, not a handful of edge cases

They say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. You’re already spending that on being a better educator and operator. You don’t need another 10,000 hours trying to be a software architect.

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Stop Pretending Time Is Free

Stop lying to yourself about what DIY costs.

You have two honest choices:

1. Buy purpose-built infrastructure and focus on what you’re actually good at: education, employer relationships, and running better classes.

2. Keep DIY-ing and count the real bill: your hours, your staff’s hours, your tools, and the opportunities you’re not chasing because you’re rebuilding automations and spreadsheets.

The chicken sandwich guy could’ve bought lunch for $15 and spent 6 months doing literally anything else.

You could buy infrastructure for roughly $1.67 per student and spend that time:

• Turning students into employer contracts

• Tightening your delivery

• Building a business that’s more than a side hustle

Or you can keep building from scratch.
Just don’t pretend it’s free.

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Calculate What You’re Really Spending

Before you lose another weekend to “just one more integration,” run the numbers:

How many hours per week do you spend on:

• Booking / payment coordination

• Sending & resending digital course materials

• Moving rosters to Atlas or Red Cross

• Managing spreadsheets and shared drives

• Tracking students and expirations

Multiply by your hourly rate.

• If you have a day job, use that rate.

• If this is full-time, use what you’d pay someone else to do it.

Add the cost of the tools you’re already paying for.

That’s your true infrastructure cost.

Now ask, honestly:

• Is that cheaper than $1.67 per student?

• And is it getting you closer to the business you say you want?

If not, change it.

We’ll walk through your current process, put a real dollar figure on your DIY stack, and show you what it looks like when the “chicken sandwich” costs $15 instead of $1,500.

Six months to six minutes.
$1,500 to $15.

That’s what specialization buys you.
Stop growing your own wheat.

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