The Dead Money Audit: What You Pay For That Nobody Uses
Every tool, every renewal, every seat you bought and never logged into. One worksheet, one afternoon, and one column nobody ever fills in: what decision has this ever changed? The typical company under $50M is sitting on close to forty percent waste. The recovery is bankable this quarter.
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A spreadsheet that grew a spine.
The four kinds of dead money
The Ghost, the Overbuy, the Redundant Pair, and the Museum Piece. Every wasted tool is one of them, and most companies have all four.
The one nobody fills in
Not cost. Not usage. What decision has this tool ever changed? That is the column that separates a tool from a subscription.
Your dead money ratio
Total recoverable over total spend, scored against four bands. Most companies land at the average, and the average is leaking a full hire.
It's always one of these.
You pay for it, nobody uses it. Usually a tool a departed employee set up, still renewing on a card nobody checks.
You use it, but you pay for ten seats and four people logged in this quarter. Enterprise pricing you never grew into.
The expensive platform for a problem you no longer have. It survives because canceling it feels like admitting the original call was wrong.
You don't have a software problem. You have an ownerless-data problem, and it's wearing a software problem's clothes.
For the owner who's never counted it.
You know what you pay in salary and rent. You have no idea what you pay for software, because nobody does. It arrives one tool at a time, each small enough to approve without a meeting, each renewing on a date nobody tracks.
This is the afternoon that ends that. The recovery is annual, it repeats every year you keep the discipline, and it is the fastest return available anywhere in the business. Nothing on the worksheet requires new software. It requires one hour and the willingness to look.
Find the money. It's already yours.
Run the audit, send me the recoverable number, and we'll talk about what to do with it. The cancellations are the easy part.
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