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During a visit to NASA in the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy stopped to chat with a janitor mopping the floor.
“What do you do here?”
JFK asked.
The janitor didn’t flinch.
“I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
The line has entered folklore. Quoted by hundreds of motivational speakers in dozens of Ted Talks. Each one pretending it was original work.
The janitor wasn’t building rockets.
He wasn’t calculating trajectories.
But mission control wasn’t going to clean itself.
That launchpad wasn’t going to make itself safe.
Without him? Who knows, maybe no countdown, no launch, and no footprints on the moon.
Think that’s over the top?
I’m betting it would have made front page news if Neil Armstrong had slipped on an uncleaned oil spill and broken something.
“One small slip for man…”
Every mission, every business, every audit has its unsung heroes. The ones doing the work no one notices, right up to the point where it doesn’t get done, and the fan gets involved.
The ones who make the rest of us look good.
And while auditors aren’t trying to escape Earth’s gravity (though some year-end jobs feel close), they’ve got missions of their own, catching risk before it blows up, keeping businesses on the straight and narrow.
But here’s the thing, most auditors are still dragging around a mop and bucket. Cleaning up chaos manually.
Fixing formatting. Spotting errors one painful cell at a time.
When what they really need is quiet tech in the background, cleaning, flagging, reconciling.
The kind of invisible support that lets them focus on the type of stuff they’re paid to focus on.
Strategy. Insights. Actually, helping clients (actually earning fees).
That tech already exists. And it’s not science. It’s an Excel plug-in that’s gathering something of a reputation for itself. A few thousand smart auditors are using it.
It doesn’t wear a cape and it won’t put a man on the moon. It just saves them 40 hours per audit and makes them look like absolute geniuses.
But we’ll save that story for another time.
Just remember, heroes aren’t always the ones standing centre stage.
Sometimes they’re mopping the launchpad.
Until next week,
Christiaan
P.S. Curious what those quietly efficient firms are using behind the scenes? Book a quick demo and see how The Audit Toolbar takes care of hours worth of repetitive tasks, without making a song and dance about it.
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Enhance your Excel with this powerful add-on, designed to make your audit work faster and more efficient.
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