3 Hidden Costs Killing Your Business Profits

You could be doing all the right things. Your product is solid, your sales are growing, your customers are happy. And yet you're still not making the kind of money you should be. Why? Because there are hidden costs. Silent profit killers, I call them, lurking inside your business. Number one with a bullet. This one's a killer. Time waste masquerading as productivity. Let's be honest, busyness is not business. Okay, okay. One of the biggest profit killers in your business is time spent on low leverage tasks. These are things that don't move the needle in your business, but look like work, look like things you should be doing. Let me give you some examples. You're tweaking the design in your website, which is not been proven to cause problems with your conversions. It's actually making you money or losing you any money, but you're just obsessing about it. Another example, doing customer support. You could be delegating to somebody else on your team. How? Hiring somebody for far less money than it costs you. Because you are the founder, you are bringing in business. You are the person that should be doing high value tasks. Tasks that bring in ten thousand, a hundred thousand dollars in your business. Another example, rewriting the same email 4 times. This should never be happening now with AI you should not be wasting time on things like this. I can't emphasize this enough. Time is your most expensive resource and it's the one resource that most people waste. So what do you do about it? I need you to audit your week. Write down everything you did in the last seven days. Assign a dollar of value to each task. Is this a $10 task? When I say $10, I mean does it bring in the value of $10 into your business? Or is it $100 task or is it a $10,000 task? You gotta see it in black and white in your face. Be honest. Then eliminate or delegate anything under $100 an hour of value. That means you should be giving this to somebody else or just cutting it out from your business completely. Now, $100 an hour is not high value even, but we gotta start somewhere, okay? If you're doing $10 an hour work, you're building a $10 an hour business. That's just the bottom line. Number two, this one's very easy to miss. And that's reoccurring charges that start to bloat. This is also known as subscription creep. You're paying for tools that you forgot you had or you haven't used in a while. So what do you do is you go into, into your paypal you go into your credit card statements and take a look at at least the last six months. What are the things that you were paying for every single month or maybe even every single year that you don't use, that you rarely use or you only think you need, Right? If you haven't used it, you don't need it. Guess what? If you need it, you can always resign up. Some examples is maybe like a design tool that you signed up and use once because maybe now you're outsourcing. Design maybe some extra SaaS tools that you might use later, maybe something that you only use seasonally, maybe a plugin that you signed up for and it's just auto renewing. These tools may only be $20 here, $50 here, $100 there, but they stack up. You want to keep your tool stack as lean as possible to keep your business as profitable as possible. Number three, huge silent killer. Poor processes equal expensive mistakes. This one's really sneaky. Every time there's a miscommunication with a client, a deadline that's missed, an appointment that's missed, a customer complaint due to a mistake, whether it was from somebody on the team or you, it's usually not a bad employee or you know, just a one time mistake. It's a broken or non existent system. A bad system in your business causes rework, refunds, stress and profit. Leakage. Leakage in your business, like a leaky bucket. Here's a story. Back when I was running Webinar Ninja, my software company, we once sent out an email to 10,000 plus users with a broken link. Okay, a link that did not work. It was a little typo. Why? Because we didn't have a double check process in place. That one email cost us $12,000 in lost sales that week. So one process could have saved us $12,000. $12,000 is no joke. So anytime you're doing any kind of task in your business, you want to systemize it, you want to document it, use checklists, use setting operating procedures. This literally just means like a Google Doc where you write down the steps of any procedure that you do regularly. If you can automate it, automate it. Because that way you just make sure it's perfect once and it just runs that play over and over. You want to train your team to own the outcomes of whatever tasks are doing and to create the system and that SOP so that they take full ownership of that task. Every system you build protects your profits. I know you're doing a million things. You're showing up you're building, you're working hard. I get it. But sometimes the money you're missing isn't from too little effort. It's from the effort spent in the wrong places. You know, I grew up in an immigrant household. My parents immigrated from Egypt to the U.S. you know, hard work was like our middle name. We had to work hard. It was just part of our upbringing. And I just thought the harder I work, the more I'll achieve. But at some point in your career as an entrepreneur, you're going to realize that it's not just about working hard. It's about working smart. Right? Don't work hard or work smarter. So they say sometimes you just don't need more hustle. You need more clarity. You need better systems. You need to get better at what you do. Like I used to play organized basketball. My coach used to say, practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. You have to practice properly in order for that to work. So take this episode as a moment to stop and say, where is the money leaking in my business? Where am I? Working hard but not working smart. Plug those leaks and you're going to find your business starts to breathe again and have healthy margins. You deserve to be profitable. You deserve a business that rewards all this effort that you're putting into it. But it starts right now with awareness. You got this. Thanks so much for tuning into the Hundred Dollar Mea show. If you want to go deeper with me, you should sign up for my three Things newsletter. It's absolutely free. It's my way to coach you from afar. I don't do any private coaching. This is a way for me to kind of have a deeper relationship with you because I want to send you what I believe you should be working on or helping you grow every single week. Every week, I send you three things. Something to think about so you're building a strong mindset. Number two, something to do so you're taking action every week. And number three, something to learn so you're skilling up and becoming better and better again. It's free. Just go to 100mba.net sign up for any of our freebies and you'll get added to our newsletter automatically. All right, until next time, keep moving forward. I'll check you in the next episode. Take care.