The hidden tax inside a $10M company
Somewhere between $5M and $15M, coordination cost starts compounding faster than revenue. Most P&Ls don’t have a line for it.
There is a tax every growing company pays and almost none of them can see. It isn’t on the P&L. It doesn’t show up as a cost centre. It shows up as a five-day workflow that used to take an afternoon, a decision that takes three months instead of three days, and a team that is busier than it has ever been while the number stays flat.
The tax is time, and time is the only resource that compounds in both directions.
Where it hides
At $2M, one person does a thing. At $10M, four people do it with two handoffs and an approval. None of those steps was a bad idea when it was added. Each one looks like process. Together they are a quiet drag on every dollar that moves through the business, and the drag grows faster than the revenue does.
A $30M creative agency was spending five days turning one approved design into fifty placements. By hand. Nobody thought of it as a problem; it was “just how we do it.” Five days per campaign, multiplied across every campaign, multiplied across every pre-approval round where the work hadn’t even been signed off. The fix lived in tools they already owned. Three hours.
Faster doesn’t just save time. It makes money.
Getting to market four months sooner is four months of revenue captured and a four-month lead on competitors. Cutting production time frees capacity you can sell without hiring. Compressing a decision from three months to three days means you respond to the market while the opportunity is still open, instead of after it’s closed.
Speed isn’t an efficiency metric. It’s a revenue metric wearing a stopwatch. And the gap between a fast business and a slow one doesn’t add up over time. It compounds.
How to find yours
Pick the three things your company does most often (a proposal, a deliverable, a decision) and time them, end to end, including the waiting. Then ask who added each step and whether they still work here. The answer is usually a process set years ago by someone who has since left, and never revisited because it never felt urgent.
Where is your company leaking revenue?
Twelve questions, five minutes, no email. A read on where to look first.