By Hiran de Silva
When Wired Magazine coined the phrase six-figure spreadsheets, it created a powerful image — one that is more intriguing when explained.
The phrase reads as if a company approached me, asked for three spreadsheets, and agreed to pay six figures for each of them.
That’s not how it happened.
Any more than the statement ‘client hired me for a temp job and hiked up my pay rate 7.5 times as in the first promo for the Global Excel Summit interview of 2020.
The reality is far more interesting — and far more relevant to anyone who has ever taken a short-term contract, walked into a seemingly ordinary Excel task, and suddenly realised they were looking at something much bigger, and much more lucrative.
This article exists to answer a question recently raised by Richard Nero:
How did that situation actually come about?
And on what basis could something as mundane-sounding as spreadsheets generate that level of value?
I Was Hired for Four Weeks — at a Modest Rate
I wasn’t hired as a high-end consultant.
I had just returned to the UK after a long period of convalescence abroad. My health was uncertain. I wasn’t even sure I would live to the end of the year. I was deliberately looking for something simple, low-stress, and short-term.
What came up was a four-week assignment to update an existing annual budgeting model.
Not redesign it.
Not transform it.
Just update it.
In today’s money, the budget for the role would have been roughly £6,000.
I accepted because it felt manageable — and because I didn’t want to be sitting at home waiting.
The First Afternoon Changed Everything
I started in the afternoon. No whiteboard. No slides. No demo. Just me, a desk, and an existing budgeting model.
Within hours, it was obvious that the job — as defined — was impossible.
Not difficult.
Impossible.
The model depended on a vast web of external links.
The data required to populate it didn’t exist yet.
The group structure had changed since the previous year.
The templates themselves were being redesigned at the same time as the consolidation.
This was a serial process masquerading as a simple update.
By week three or four, someone would be expected to compress months of work into days — and it would fail. The person doing it would either quit, break down, or be blamed.
I had seen this movie before.
I Didn’t Look at It Like an Excel Temp
Here’s the crucial point.
If I had looked at this as a £350-a-day Excel temp job, I would have kept my head down and updated the numbers.
Instead, I looked at it wearing a consultant’s hat.
I called together the CFO, his deputy, and the commercial director. I had 45 minutes before leaving for a theatre rehearsal — I was playing a principal role in Kiss Me, Kate that evening.
I said, bluntly:
“This will not work.”
Then I explained why.
Every objection landed. Heads nodded. They could all see it once it was laid out.
The Question That Changed the Room
I asked a simple question:
“What database do you have?”
The CFO immediately said:
“We don’t have one. We’re not allowed to use one.”
That should have been the end of the conversation.
But the commercial director interrupted him and said:
“No — go on. Please explain.”
That moment mattered.
The Shift from Serial to Parallel
What I proposed wasn’t a spreadsheet trick.
It was a change in process architecture.
Instead of everything waiting on everything else, the work would run in parallel:
- Data would be gathered independently and validated centrally
- Templates would be designed independently
- Group structures could change without breaking anything
- Consolidation would be live — not dependent on fragile links
The spreadsheets would still look familiar to users.
But they would behave very differently.
When users finished, they wouldn’t email files or rely on links.
They would click a button marked PUT — submitting their data into a central store.
From that moment onward:
- Consolidations were always current
- Nothing needed “processing”
- And nothing critical lived inside a document
This was in 2007. Long before Power Query. Long before today’s conversations.
“I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This”
When I returned with a working demonstration model, the reaction was immediate.
The person responsible for the original model — one of the most accomplished Excel users I’ve ever met — looked at it and said:
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
And that was that.
We simply executed the plan.
Why Nothing Broke — Even When Something Did
Partway through the budgeting process, a formula error was discovered in the template — after hundreds of workbooks had already been issued.
In a traditional, document-linked model, this would have been a crisis.
It wasn’t.
Because the data already lived safely elsewhere.
We fixed the template.
Users reopened their files.
The correction flowed through automatically.
No panic.
No rework.
No risk to the collected data.
From the client’s point of view, this was astonishing.
So Where Did the “Six Figures” Come From?
Not from a quote.
Not from selling spreadsheets.
The value accumulated because:
- The same architecture was reused for forecasting
- Then for reporting
- Then for KPIs
- Then for other connected processes
What had been delivered was not “three spreadsheets”.
It was an internal, extensible enterprise capability — built with Excel as the client.
Over time, my total billing — in today’s money — reached roughly £540,000.
That’s where the phrase six-figure spreadsheets came from.
But it misses the point.
The Pattern That Always Follows
Here’s the part people find uncomfortable.
Those who blocked the work, dismissed it, or couldn’t understand it — fell away.
Those who engaged, learned, and used it — were promoted.
The senior sponsor of the work was later sent to run a major overseas operation, taking his team with him.
That’s not drama.
That’s organisational selection.
This Was Never About Excel
Excel was not the story.
The story was recognising:
- An impossible critical path
- A fragile document-based process
- And a way to remove both — quickly, calmly, and permanently
That is why the work extended.
That is why it paid well.
And that is why the phrase six-figure spreadsheets is both catchy — and wrong.
What was delivered was not spreadsheets.
It was a change in what the organisation believed was possible.
And once that happens, the numbers stop being surprising.
— Hiran de Silva
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