🧰 Tuesday Toolbook
I've been in sales for 29 years, which means I've been keeping score for 29 years…
Ask me about the revenue side of any business I've run and I can go for an hour without looking anything up. Leads in, cost to acquire, close rate, average ticket, what a client is worth over three years. That's the fun math. That's the math that makes you feel good about yourself on a Sunday night.
Then there's the other math…
The other math doesn't show up on a dashboard. It shows up in pieces. Three different cards, eleven different billing dates, company names on the statement that look nothing like the product your team actually uses. Fourteen dollars here. Two hundred ninety-seven there. A charge you have to Google to identify.
Nobody sits down and adds that up. It just renews.
So here's where I've landed after all these years of watching business owners run their numbers…
You can tell me your “cost per lead.”
You cannot tell me your “cost per login.”
I've started calling it that on purpose. Cost per lead is a number you defend, you argue about, you optimize down every quarter. Cost per login is the same kind of number pointed the other direction, and almost nobody in this business has ever calculated it once.
And I'll admit something about this year specifically…
I added AI tools. So did you. So did everybody I talk to. But I didn't cancel a single thing to make room for them, and I don't know anybody who did. The stack didn't get replaced this year. It got taller. Which means your cost per login went up, and nobody told you.
Which brings me to the timing…
In a few months you're going to sit down and build a plan for next year. Revenue target, headcount, ad budget, the whole thing. And every line of that plan is going to get stacked on top of one number you have never actually looked at.
That's what today's pick fixes.
The Stack Audit™ Calculator
It walks your tech stack and hands you the one thing you've never had: a clear, itemized picture of every dollar going out the door and what it's actually buying you.
Where two tools do the same job. Where you're paying for seats nobody logs into. Where the small subscriptions quietly stacked into a real number. And what you can cut or consolidate this week.
Say it surfaces three you can kill. A $99, a $149, and a $79. That's $327 a month. $3,924 a year. No new clients, no new ads, no new traffic. Just money you're already earning that stops walking out the door.
It's free, and it takes a few minutes.
You know your cost per lead by heart. Go get the other one.
P.S. See you inside The Growth Stack later this week — "Why AI Keeps Getting It Almost Right"
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