What's it like to be non-technical and own a company?

I met with a family member over the weekend to discuss his latest endeavor for his company. Him being more of a business person and I more of a technical guy, he wanted me to take a look at what he had going on. The idea itself solved a good problem, was a web application, but was written pretty poorly. The application ran him around 10K (custom developed from some shop) and I think I could have did it in 2 weeks max.

The entire time we spoke he kept jumping out of the technical areas and back into business land. At some point I got annoyed and just asked him to clearly define how he was going to go from investment to potential profit. He didn't have an answer or any clue of how to finish off the application as he was not technical and couldn't finish it himself. When I looked at the code, it was workable, but in my opinion needed a good cleaning (not a total rewrite, but almost) to get to where he wanted.

When I have these sort of ideas I tend to knock them out rather quickly, by myself and then think of what I can do with it. Creating all this stuff never costs me money unless I really feel like it is worth my while. I couldn't imagine being in a situation where I had a decent idea and actually had to pay for it to get created.

So with all that said, how do non-technical people do it? I get the whole risk/reward model, but at what point do you feel out of your element and how do you actually produce?