Recently, I decided it was finally time to stop using my father's 20-year-old golf clubs.
I'd been playing with them for years, and at some point I figured I was ready for a real set of my own. Not just something off the rack, either. If I was going to spend the money, I wanted to do it right.
So I went and got fitted.
The process was actually pretty impressive. I hit different clubs. We looked at the numbers. Launch angle, spin, ball speed, distance, dispersion. The fitter made recommendations based on what he was seeing. I also had some input from a friend whose opinion I trusted.
Eventually, it was time to make a decision.
There was just one problem.
I was never really comfortable.
One of the strange things about buying golf clubs is that you don't really get to test them.
During a fitting, you're mostly hitting 7-irons with different combinations of heads and shafts. From that, the fitter extrapolates what the rest of the set should look like.
You don't play a round with them. You don't spend a week hitting them. You don't see how the 5-iron feels from a bad lie or how the pitching wedge feels around the green.
You hit some balls, look at the data, listen to the professional, and eventually hand over your credit card.
About a thousand dollars later, I had my new clubs.
And now that I've actually played with them?
They're okay. That's the whole review. Okay.
I'm still not comfortable with them. I find myself thinking about my old clubs. More importantly, my game has gotten substantially worse.
Oddly enough, even my driver disappeared at the same time. The driver isn't new. It wasn't part of the fitting. But changing the irons seems to have changed something in my swing, my confidence, or probably a little of both. Suddenly the whole thing feels off.
And now I'm in a strange position.
The clubs are mine. There's no return policy. I could sell them and take a loss. I could go back to my old clubs. Or I can trust the golf professional who looked at the data and told me these clubs were the best fit for my swing.
Maybe he's right. Maybe I just need time.
But I don't actually know.
And that's when I realized how much buying golf clubs feels like partnering with an IT company.
Economists Michael Darby and Edi Karni gave this a name back in 1973, in a paper called "Free Competition and the Optimal Amount of Fraud." They called them credence goods: products and services that are difficult for the buyer to evaluate even after they've bought them and used them.
IT fits that description remarkably well.
Most businesses know they need good technology, cybersecurity, backups, infrastructure, support, and increasingly AI capabilities. But knowing whether you're actually getting those things at the level you should be getting them is much harder.
It's a little like my club fitting.
The provider has more technical knowledge than you do. They can show you assessments, reports, dashboards, specifications, certifications, tools, and recommendations. They can explain why their approach is right for your business.
At some point, though, you have to make a decision.
And once you do, changing your mind isn't easy.
There's onboarding. Migration. Contracts. Hardware. Licensing. Institutional knowledge. Employee disruption. Time. Money.
The equivalent of selling the clubs and starting over is a lot more painful when you're talking about the technology infrastructure of an entire company.
This is where the analogy gets more interesting.
Imagine a business switches IT providers.
A few weeks in, things might not feel better. In fact, parts of the experience might feel worse.
Employees are learning a new way to get support. There are new processes, new people, new tools, and new expectations. Things that used to happen one way now happen another way. The new IT company is still learning the little nuances of the environment that the old team knew from years of experience.
The natural reaction is to compare everything to what you had before.
That's exactly what I'm doing with my golf clubs.
Every bad shot makes me think about the old set. Every uncomfortable swing makes me wonder if I made the wrong decision. The old clubs start looking better and better in my memory.
My old clubs are comfortable because I've been playing them for years. I know them. That doesn't mean they're still the right clubs for me.
The same thing happens in IT.
This is the part that took me longer to recognize, because at work I'm usually sitting on the other side of this conversation.
When a company moves from internal IT to an MSP, or from one MSP to another, there are almost always growing pains.
The first stretch is mostly discovery. Someone is mapping the network, the licensing, the backup jobs, and the handful of workarounds nobody ever wrote down. After that comes standardization, which usually means changing something that worked fine for a reason nobody remembers. And somewhere in there, a problem that has been quietly broken for three years finally surfaces, which can look an awful lot like the new provider caused it.
As the IT professional, I know that.
I've seen enough transitions to know that most of those early pains go away. The new team learns the environment. Employees get used to the new processes. Systems get standardized. Problems that have existed for years get uncovered and fixed. Eventually the new way stops feeling new.
From our side of the table, it's easier to see because we've been through it before.
The client hasn't.
They're experiencing the uncertainty for the first time.
That's what makes the position so difficult. The client is being told by the expert that things are moving in the right direction while their own experience is temporarily telling them otherwise.
Which, now that I think about it, sounds a lot like what my golf professional told me.
This didn't hit me as a marketing idea. It hit me on a tee box, somewhere around the fifth bad shot.
My old clubs are the old IT environment. Twenty years old. Probably not right for me anymore. But I know them. I know what a good shot feels like with them, and I know what a bad one feels like. There's comfort in familiarity even when familiarity isn't better.
The new clubs are Flexible IT.
Not as a pitch. As a realization about where I was standing.
For years I've been the person on the other side of that decision. I'm the one explaining why a change makes sense. I'm the one pointing at the data, saying the first few weeks will feel unfamiliar, saying it gets better. I believed every word of it. I still do.
But I'd never been the guy holding the receipt.
I'd never spent real money on expert advice, felt worse afterward, and had no way to tell whether the expert was right or whether I'd just made an expensive mistake. That's a specific kind of uncomfortable, and I don't think you can fully understand it from the other chair.
Now I do. Somewhere out there is a business owner standing over the same shot, wondering the same thing I am.
Change can be uncomfortable without being wrong. I've said some version of that sentence a hundred times. It reads very differently when you're the one who has to believe it.
That's ultimately what makes credence goods so interesting.
When you know less about something than the person advising you, there's always going to be an element of trust.
The analytics mattered when I bought my clubs. The fitting mattered. The professional's experience mattered. But ultimately I had to trust that he knew something I couldn't see yet.
Businesses make the same decision with their IT company.
Here's the part that gets me, though. My fitter did tell me what to expect. He walked me through the numbers. He told me there would be an adjustment period. He was upfront about all of it.
I still question the decision every time I stand over the ball.
That's what a credence good does to you. The information was there. The verification wasn't.
Which is why explaining isn't enough on its own. A good IT partner has to give the client something they can check without taking anyone's word for it. Not just what the first 30, 60, and 90 days will look like, but what specific evidence will show it worked:
Trust isn't the thing you ask for. It's what's left over after you've made yourself easy to verify.
Because there's a difference between growing pains and a bad decision, and the client shouldn't have to guess which one they're living through.
For now, I'm keeping the clubs.
Not because I'm certain. Because I've figured out what I'm actually up against, and it isn't the new irons. It's twenty years of knowing exactly what the old ones felt like.
Change is uncomfortable. That discomfort is real and it's worth taking seriously. It just isn't the same thing as being a mistake.
So I'm going to keep swinging.
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