you might be.
in my experience “just snipping off a bud” leads to operator bias (read grossly inflated numbers).
I’ve asked for “samples” from three head growers and sampled buds from along a branch from the same strain.
the buds submitted by the growers were very tightly clustered around 27% THC, the buds I sampled ranged from 9% to 25% (? its been awhile) along the length of a single branch.
you need representative and ideally repetitive sampling.
Which is where having your own In House analytics is by far the best solution.