Tuesday morning I got to play my favorite game in business. It is the only game I know that you can only play once.
I was sitting in a coffee shop, on the weekly leadership call with a home services company I invested in earlier this year. I am about three weeks into working with this team, so we were rebuilding their scorecard for the new quarter. Most of it was housekeeping. Renaming metrics into common language, adding descriptions, adding a line so we could watch the debt get chopped down week over week. Then I told them I was adding a metric I was fairly sure none of them had ever tracked, because almost nobody tracks it. Annual cost savings. I set the goal at $100,000 and told them the truth about why I love it: you play this game hard, you play it once, and then you shelf it and go back to running the business.
The metric came out of a conversation the week before. I had asked two of their leaders a simple question: why have we never sat down and considered something new? A different supplier, a different tool, a different way of doing the same job. Their answer was about as honest as it gets. We jumped into this, inherited what we had, and never took a step back to challenge it.
That answer is no knock on them. These are people who love their trade, and they love it so much that the business side of the trade never got the same attention. Their focus has always been clients and delivery, and it shows. This is one of the few turnaround deals I have ever seen with over 100 five star reviews and not a single negative one. I went digging for bad post-project feedback and could not find any. The craft was never the problem. We just forgot to run the business next to it. And that is exactly the environment where spend piles up. Spend does not arrive on the P&L because someone chose it on purpose. It accumulates. A subscription solves a problem in March and outlives the problem by two years. A supplier gets picked in a hurry during a busy season and becomes the supplier forever. Nobody is being careless. There is just no moment on anyone’s calendar where the P&L has to defend itself. So the P&L fills up with expenses that never earned their way onto it. They just found their way on.
The proof was already sitting in their books. A few weeks earlier their operations lead had switched paint suppliers, and the new paint came in 40 to 50 dollars a gallon cheaper. The crews actually like it better. Project that across a year of jobs and it is an easy, nearly five figure saving. Nobody had counted it as a win because nobody was keeping score. I told him I loved the move and that I was not going to let him count it, since it happened before the game started. That stung a little, which was the point. New game, new finds only. The response I got back told me the game had already taken hold: I want to see where we get.
Twenty minutes later the game got its first live test. We hit ninety.io, the software companies use to run EOS. Nothing wrong with the tool. We were barely using it to its full nature, we had already moved the work into other systems, and we had no plan to change that. It was still billing every month. I asked the only question that matters at that moment: is there any reason we cannot cancel this right now? There was not. So we canceled it on the call, right there, instead of turning it into a follow-up task for next week. I guessed it was costing a whopping $30 a month. The billing page said $41.47. He announced to the room that we had just found one percent of the goal, ran the math out loud, and corrected himself. Half a percent. About $500 a year, banked before the meeting ended. Then he typed a comment straight into the scorecard cell so the find had a name and a date.
Small number. But the room changed. For the rest of the call the game ran itself. A second tool went on the chopping block and survived only because it turned out we were on the free plan, so no points. A mileage tracking app that would have added 80 dollars a month lost to a free one the crew already uses. When we got to a marketing decision near the end, one of them framed it as something we could revisit “unless we find all hundred grand of our savings very quick.” An hour earlier the metric did not exist. Now it was vocabulary. Saving money had become scoring points instead of getting scolded, because the finds were tracked and there was a number on the other side of them. Give a team a scoreboard and an incentive and they will go looking for reasons to slim the business down. Without one, every line item gets the benefit of the doubt forever.
Will we actually find $100,000 this year? Maybe. Maybe not. And I doubt every dollar we find stays found. We will save some real money, and then we will probably turn around and spend a chunk of it on other parts of the business. That is fine with me. The cash was never the whole prize. The prize is that by the time the run ends, every line on the P&L has had to defend itself out loud. What stays, stays because somebody stood up for it. The paint stays, because the work needs paint. The tool nobody could defend is gone. No unearned expenses.
One warning, because there is a real failure mode hiding inside this. I have watched companies turn cost cutting into a personality. Once the leader becomes known as the person who nickels every line, people stop bringing ideas and start hiding spend, and the whole exercise curdles into fear. That is why this game can only be played once, and the reason is cultural, not mathematical. The first run feels like a treasure hunt. The scoreboard is new, the finds count as wins, and the whole team plays. Run it back next quarter and the same exercise sends a different message: spend is under permanent suspicion here. The scoreboard turns into surveillance. People stop challenging their own line items and start defending them, because now the game feels aimed at them instead of at the P&L. So play it hard, bank the findings, reinvest what you found, and shelf it. Maybe the game comes off the shelf once every other year, after the P&L has had time to collect new passengers. But it never goes on the calendar. The moment cost cutting becomes a recurring meeting, it stops being a season and becomes the weather.
Working Theory: Earn Its Spot
The rule: everything on the P&L needs to earn its spot on the P&L. If nobody can defend a line item out loud, it is either not worth it or there is a better alternative. Here is how I am running it:
Put annual cost savings on the scorecard with a real target. Ours is $100,000. Pick a number big enough that one canceled subscription cannot win the game, so the team has to hunt through suppliers, tools, and contracts, and cannot stop at the easy stuff.
Walk the P&L line by line with two questions. Does this spend deserve its spot? And if it looks lazy, is it actually lazy, or is there truly no better option? Sometimes both are true. The paint stays, because the work needs paint. The software nobody logs into gets no such defense.
Cancel in the meeting, not after. A cost decision that becomes a follow-up task has a survival rate I do not trust. If there is no reason not to cancel right now, cancel right now.
Log every find against the target, publicly. The scoreboard is what keeps this from feeling like an audit. People bring you savings when finding one counts as scoring.
Play it once, then shelf it. When the run ends, retire the metric, reinvest what you found, and go back to building. Maybe it comes back off the shelf once every other year. It never goes on a schedule. A company that never stops cutting teaches its people to hide spend.
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