Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
18 Aug 2025 · 4 min
0:00
In this solo episode of Double Your Profit, the host outlines a systematic approach to slashing recurring business expenses. He creates a monthly "fuck it up" list that catalogs every subscription and recurring cost, then aggressively negotiates or cancels them. The method relies on digital vendor cards (e.g., Ramp, Divvy) that isolate each vendor’s spend, giving leverage to renegotiate or pull the plug. He stresses keeping a running, deliberately cumbersome list of services to make the audit painful and thus incentivize reduction. The process includes monthly (or more frequent) reviews, assigning budget owners, and instituting an intentionally inconvenient approval workflow for any new recurring expense. Finally, any savings are funneled back into the team—often as bonuses for the budget owners—creating a virtuous loop of cost discipline and employee investment.
Chapters
Welcome back to Double Your Profit. What we're gonna be talking about is reviewing all of your recurring costs. Now I have a different name for this that they're gonna bleep out on YouTube, but it's called the fuck it up list. So every single month, what I do is I create a fuck it up list where I list out all of the recurring costs inside my business and I go fuck them up. I remove as many of them from our business, or I aggressively negotiate each of those price points because recurring costs are a big deal. So first off, every single cost matters, especially if it's recurring. I'm gonna care about $100 a month and I'm gonna care about $2,000 a month. Might care a little bit more about the $2,000 a month, but you can stack up a lot of those little $100 at a time things inside a $30 million business and they're kind of hard to catch. So what you should be doing every single month is, first off, you have to get onto a credit card system that allows for cost segregation. You wanna be able to set it up so that each and every service has its own digital credit card. Ramp has this, Divvy has this, but if you go to a Chase or an American Express, they don't. So your credit system matters to be able to effectively manage this. The reason the digital vendor card matters is because you can isolate costs. So if I want to go in and renegotiate a specific vendor cost, this is one of those golden rules: he who has the gold makes the rules. So it's much easier to negotiate a cost while you still have the money versus if they were already charging and they have the money in their account. So when you have a vendor card, what you can do if you're getting ready to cancel it or renegotiate it or do whatever you're about to do, just cancel the vendor card. That is a really important tool in the negotiating playbook is being able to isolate that vendor to one single card so that way you can just always stay on top of it and you have a lever to pull if you need to. The next one is keeping a running list of all of the different recurring services that you have. And if you're sitting there thinking, that's a lot, I don't really wanna keep that list, my friend, that is probably the point. If you have that many recurring services that it's a lot, then that's a really good place to start. Sometimes, Creating a report or creating a system to manage things is about being annoying. So this is one of those things where I actually kind of want this to be painful because what that's going to encourage us to do is have less of them. The more annoying that it is to put together this report, the more incentivized we're all going to be to have less recurring services. Once you have that list and you have the vendor cards, you want to be reviewing these things monthly, even more if you can, depending on how often they charge, and constantly checking back in with your team on, hey, is this tool still useful? And sometimes just to watch the world burn. And maybe cancel the card and see if they actually do still need it. Renegotiate constantly. There is no such thing as renegotiating too often. I like renegotiating. I think it's funny. There are very few times in your life as a business owner where you just get to be an absolute dick and nobody can say anything that mean to you, and renegotiating is definitely one of them. My other couple big tips on this is you want to assign budget owners for recurring costs. It should be as inconvenient as humanly possible to bring on recurring costs. And I mean, it should be awful. So including your department heads and giving them budget ownership and forcing an approval process for recurring expenses that is extremely inconvenient is an awesome way to save money. And finally, make sure you're reinvesting those savings, ideally in your people. Now, the way to do this is as you've added budget owners and as you've added high accountability and you've brought on this process, once you have savings, what do you do with it? I mean, one of the benefits of having a high-profit company is you get to invest in your team, who then makes the company more profitable. So if you have savings, then maybe the budget owner for those savings gets a portion of that back as a bonus. Like, hey, thanks for saving us some money. Here's some money. If you liked this video on ruthlessly cutting recurring expenses, make sure you like and sub for more.
