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Hi there! 👋

Today, we’re diving into something crucial for every business: Hidden Costs in Your Organization.

Hidden costs are like an anchor around your neck, holding you back from maximizing profits.

Hidden costs exist in your organization too. Here are three organizational costs you should cut ASAP:

1️⃣ Meetings

Step 1 is to attend all standing meetings. Marketing updates, department heads, sales forecasts—you name it.

Step 2: cut all of them.

Now, I’m not saying all meetings are useless. But most are. Just add up every attendee’s hourly rate and multiply it by the time spent in the meeting—that’s a lot of money wasted!

Meetings give the illusion that work is getting done when it isn’t. We never came out of a meeting more profitable than when we went in.

So cut every single one, then reschedule only when there’s a strong justification for the cost.

2️⃣ Organizational Spam

most e-com companies are big and bloated.

They lack a culture of responsibility.

One big symptom? Too many “CCs” on every email.

No one wants to own anything, so everyone CCs everyone else.

No one wants to decide anything, so they CC everyone in their chain of command and everyone else’s chain of command, hoping that just getting the word out fulfills their responsibility. Or that it shows they’re doing work.

The end result? Your team spends too much time in their inboxes, weeding through mountains of email garbage instead of doing their jobs.

You have to kill this practice starting at the top. If you get CC’d on something irrelevant, bring it up. Set a new standard with your management team.

Another symptom of this lack of responsibility? Too many reports. I used to have a flooded inbox with countless reports. The business was over-quantifying everything to look busy, but most of these metrics were useless.

Kill the CCs, kill the reports, kill the over-quantification.

3️⃣ Long IT Projects

Every business has them.

At both Petrol and JohnBeerens, it was “migration from the legacy stack.” At other companies it might been ‘the big Netsuite migration.’

You know how long these projects have overshoot their inital timeframe? BY months and months.

Months of consultants, SEO analysis, investments and garbage.

Bob Fifer recommends killing all IT projects that extend longer than 6 months.

I’ve adopted that rule—it’s a great rule of thumb. If something can’t get done within 6 months, there won’t be a payoff.

There are lots of hidden organizational costs in a business.

Meetings, CCs, and long IT projects are where I like to start.

Next up: we’ll talk about customer satisfaction (yes, it’s an operational issue).

Stay tuned.

Have a great day,

Whenever you’re ready, there are three ways I can help you.

1. 1:1 Advisory for E-Com Managers: I help you run, scale & optimize your e-commerce business.

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3. Book a 1:1 Call. A No Bullshit 20 min Ask Me Anything call. If you’re facing challenges in online business, I’m happy to talk.

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