The Hidden Cost of DIY 🔧

“I can do it myself – how hard can it be?”

Picture this… It’s a beautiful summer Sunday in July.

The sun is out. The windows are open. It’s one of those rare Pacific Northwest days where you feel like you should be outside soaking in nature.

Instead, I hear it.

That faint but persistent sound of a toilet running.

No big deal, right?

I lift the lid. The flapper isn’t sealing. Simple fix. Ten bucks and 20 minutes at most. I’ve watched enough YouTube to be dangerous.

Home Depot Trip #1.
Purchase: one new flapper.

Back home. I go to shut off the water. The water shut-off valve turns… but doesn’t fully shut off. Huh. That’s odd. But how bad could a little running water be?

I reach in to remove the old flapper.
And the entire central post snaps off in my hand. 🤦
Not ideal.

Home Depot Trip #2.
Purchase: one “universal” flush valve replacement unit. Because now we’re past flappers. We’re doing surgery.

Back home. Water still running. I start the install.
Except… “universal” apparently does not mean universal. It doesn’t fit.

Home Depot Trip #3.
Another “universal” unit. Surely this one is actually universal.

Back home. I start installing it. Halfway through, I realize something important – because the central post is broken, I can’t remove the remaining threaded portion from the tank. Which means I can’t install the new unit.

Water. Still. Running.

It is now 10:38 p.m.
I wave the white flag and call the plumber. Thank goodness he picks up. Jason says he can be there first thing in the morning.

Now, I get to turn off the water to the entire house. Hope no one needs a shower soon!

The next morning, I make one more run – Home Depot Trip #4 – this time for an entirely new toilet, wax ring, and the various accessories I now know far more about than I ever intended.

Jason shows up.

In less than an hour, he’s completely done. In what took me nearly two days of trial and error to mess up, he replaces the shutoff valve (which was jammed open by a tiny rock), installs an entirely new toilet, replaces all the internals, and has everything running perfectly.

But here’s where the story shifts from comedy to cautionary tale.

As he pulls the old toilet, Jason discovers something.

There’s the beginning of rot in the subfloor from the previous install. (Which, for the record, was also done by yours truly!)

Water had been slowly leaking under the toilet — invisible from above, quietly starting to deteriorate the floor beneath us.

We were one bad seal away from significant structural damage. Another 6-12 months of invisible leakage, and we could have literally fallen through the bathroom floor into the six-foot crawlspace below. 😳

What started as “just a flapper” wasn’t the problem.

It was a symptom.

And had a professional not stepped in, the hidden issue would have continued, quietly compounding.

The bright side?
A series of misfortunate events forced me to bring in someone who knew exactly what they were doing – and likely saved us from far bigger damage down the line.

The hard truth?
If I had trusted that I don’t know what I don’t know…
I could have called Jason on Sunday afternoon, saved two days of frustration and wasted efforts, and avoided the risk altogether.

The Hidden Cost of DIY

What started as a “simple flapper” turned into something much more instructive. Here are a few lessons I took away from that long Sunday:

Lesson #1

Discernment: Prioritizing the Right Things, in the Right Order

There were at least a dozen things I could see and do – replace the flapper, turn off the water shutoff, swap the central unit, and keep running back and forth to Home Depot.

But I wasn’t asking the better question:

What is actually the core issue? And what needs to be addressed first?

In leadership – and in growing sustainable recurring giving – activity is not the same as progress.

You can tweak messaging.
Launch another campaign.
Adjust your donation form.
Rewrite emails.

But if you’re not addressing the right things, in the right order, you can spend months (or years) staying busy without building something durable.

Discernment isn’t about doing more.
It’s about doing what matters most.

Lesson #2

Symptoms vs. Root Issues: Not Everything That’s Visible Is the Real Problem

The running toilet was a symptom.

The faulty shutoff valve, the slow leak under the wax ring, and the beginning of subfloor rot were the real issues.

DIY thinking often focuses on what’s visible and urgent, but experience looks beneath the surface.

In sustainable recurring giving, the “running toilet” might be:

• A dip in retention

• An underperforming campaign

• A sluggish acquisition month

But often the deeper issue is structural:

A flawed onboarding journey
Too many competing priorities
Focus on the wrong channels
Lack of a cohesive strategy

Superficial fixes feel productive.
Root-level fixes create sustainability.

Lesson #3 

Pattern Recognition: Borrowing Hard-Earned Experience Compresses Time

I’ve seen maybe two or three plumbing issues in my life. Jason has seen hundreds — maybe thousands.

Jason didn’t guess.
He didn’t experiment.
He didn’t need four trips to Home Depot.
He recognized the pattern immediately.

Pattern recognition compresses time.

That’s one of the hidden costs of DIY:

You pay in time.
You pay in frustration.
You pay in mistakes.
You sometimes pay in preventable damage.

The right expertise doesn’t just fix problems — it shortens the path to results.

The Cost of Learning the Hard Way

There’s a certain pride in figuring things out yourself. 

But sometimes the cost of “learning the hard way” is months (or years) lost, taking unnecessary risks, and hidden damage quietly compounding beneath the surface.

Sometimes the most strategic move isn’t doing it yourself — it’s recognizing the hard-earned experience of others and inviting it into the room.

Recently, I was speaking with a leader named Kevin about the Sustainable Giving Accelerator – our flagship deep-dive and coaching program that helps leaders and teams scale recurring giving.

I told Kevin that, at their size, it might not make sense. We find that with this level of depth and one-on-one coaching, organizations typically need to have more than 500-1,000 donors or $500k+ in annual recurring revenue to really scale their program. 

His response stopped me.

“I could go away for two or three years, make a lot of mistakes, and try to figure this out on my own… or I could bring you in now and do it right.”

Touché, Kevin. Great point. 

An Intentional Path to Sustainable Growth

Kevin’s comment stuck with me.

There’s nothing wrong with learning.
There’s nothing wrong with experimenting.
And there’s certainly nothing wrong with building internal capacity – we love working with internal teams to grow ownership and capability.

But there is a cost to trying to figure everything out alone.

If you’re working to grow sustainable recurring giving and you feel the weight of that – if you’re tired of guessing, tweaking, and hoping it clicks – we can help.

Our Sustainable Giving Accelerator is a deep dive. It’s not for everyone. And I’ll often say that upfront.

But for the right organizations – the ones who want clarity, structure, and 6-12 months of focused implementation – it can compress years of trial and error into a much shorter, more strategic path.

And if the Accelerator isn’t the right fit?
We’ve built other options for leaders at different stages of readiness.

If you’d like to explore what growing sustainable recurring giving could look like for your organization – and whether doing it together makes sense – we’d be glad to have that conversation.

You can start here:

👉 www.sustainablegiving.org/grow

Fill out the short form, and someone from our team will be in touch.

No pressure, no hard pitch – just a thoughtful conversation about what’s possible.

Until next week… Surf’s Up! 🌊

  - Dave