This might be the shortest article that we ever put out on Hit Reboot.
But, the point is so important...
That I don't want to dilute it by being too verbose.
I am concerned that many small businesses' growth is being weighed down by an anchor that they're unaware of...
Ready for it?
Unused software spending.
By unused, I mean 100% not being utilized.
Software licenses for employees no longer at the company...
Cloud server CPU that isn't getting tapped...
Annual subscriptions that renew to platforms our team has long forgotten about.
Estimates are that as many as 1 in 2 (paid) software licenses are actually not being leveraged...
And as high as $1 out of every $3 spent on the cloud is not getting deployed.
I realize what you might be thinking...
"That's impossible. How could that be happening?"
Here's how.
The big $100,000 expenses get everyone's attention on a leadership team...
The CFO and the CEO talk about the vendor.
They debate whether they need them, negotiate discounts, etc.
But, the actual line items that make up this $100k?
Or the hundreds of $156 subscriptions that run each month?
It can feel like there are too many to track down every user of each software...
And ask them "whether they actually need it."
At scale, this thinking leads to an enormous amount of bloat.
I'm talking like $10,000/month of profit getting lost in a business only making $30,000/month on $300,000/month of revenue...
Serious money.
While I wish the SaaS companies had it in them to tell their customers when their tools were going unused...
We can't count on this.
But, we're kidding ourselves if we think it's not worth a day a month or a week a quarter to go line by line with each of our functional teams...
So they can defend every single line item of spending.
(Note: for software expenses that don't seem to have an owner, I'd suggest just canceling them and seeing if someone reaches out to you asking you to resubscribe).
While it might seem tedious on your first cycle...
I can almost guarantee something interesting will happen by the second and third cycle...
Your team's waste will plummet.
Because your people will start to realize just how seriously you take every penny of spending.
IN CONCLUSION:
I wish this were more complicated, but it's really not.
Go line by line with your team.
And gain a huge advantage over your competition simply by not paying for things you don't (and won’t) use.
As ridiculous as it sounds, this is a huge opportunity.