Founders, are you embarrassed by your messy books?

I run a bookkeeping, tax, and accounting startup. We help a lot of startups get their books cleaned up after years of neglect or poor outsourced accounting.

So many customers come in and tell us "yeah it's not too bad" but then we get in there and within 15 minutes it's clear they have NO IDEA how bad the problem is.

i wonder if this is embarrassment, unwillingness to accept that there was an issue, or pride/ego getting in the way.

what do you guys think? anyone get over this hump or admit to themselves there was an issue before it was too late?