Operating from San Diego to Santa Barbara, Tellus had no reliable way to forecast when a project would actually clear a city's permitting process. Every jurisdiction was different, and a wrong forecast could break a schedule or a client relationship.
Instead of guessing, I brought design, plan expediting, and eventually interior design in house, running that arm of the business at a loss, because the real value was the forecasting knowledge it generated, not the design fees.
If a capability doesn't exist in the market at a price or quality you can trust, and it's core to your business's reliability, the answer is to build it yourself even if it doesn't pay for itself directly. The knowledge of which cities move fast, which stall, and why, that becomes a durable asset no outside consultant can sell you.
Tellus became fluent in jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction approval patterns across four states, eventually took on plan-expediting contracts as its own service line, and that forecasting discipline underpins the estimating and design systems I still build today.
If nobody sells the tool you need, build it inside your own company, even at a loss, because the knowledge you gain running it is worth more than the fee you'd have paid someone else.
This was me choosing to absorb short-term cost for long-term certainty, on behalf of my clients and my own schedule. A judgment call a spreadsheet alone wouldn't have made for me.