Your business already runs on a system. It grew a piece at a time instead of being built: a spreadsheet in the middle, a ring of subscriptions around it, and at least one person who spends part of every day carrying numbers between them. It mostly works, because that person is diligent.
Today I want you to do one small thing with that system: add it up. It takes about five minutes, a card statement, and a sticky note, and it produces two numbers that change how the whole rent-or-own conversation feels.
The first number: the rent
Step one, count the tools. Pull up the card statement and list every piece of software the business pays for. Scheduling, forms, storage, e-signatures, the CRM, the site builder, the extra seat you added so the office could see the calendar. Catch the annual ones too; a statement usually hides a couple of subscriptions you forgot you had. A typical company under fifty people lands around sixteen.
Step two, multiply the seats. For every tool that charges per person, multiply by your people. This is the step where the number starts to move, because per-seat pricing means every hire raises the software bill the same week.
Step three, stretch it out. Total it for the month. Multiply by twelve for the year. Then multiply by five, because a business is a long-lived thing and five years is how you’d judge any other investment.
Picture a twelve-person outfit paying ordinary rates, say $180 a head across the whole stack each month. That’s about $2,160 a month, roughly $26,000 a year, and around $130,000 over five years, for tools that are each fine on their own and were never designed to work together.
Step four, add the glue. Somewhere in your business, a person is the pipe between those tools: the same customer typed into the sheet, then the invoice tool, then the scheduler. Estimate their hours honestly and price them. Five hours a week at $25 an hour is another $6,500 a year, and five hours a week is on the polite end of what I usually find.
The second number: the load
Money is the smaller half of the worksheet. Now count these, right under the first number.
How many logins the business runs on. How many places the same customer’s name gets typed. When two tools disagree about a number, which one is the truth, and does everyone agree on that answer? And the person holding it all together: what happens the week they’re on vacation?
That second number never shows up on a statement, but it shows up in the day. When Harvard Business Review researchers measured it, they clocked workers flipping between applications about 1,200 times a day and losing close to four hours a week just reorienting after the switches. Read the study; the number sounds absurd until you watch yourself work for an afternoon. That’s the mental load, measured: most of a Friday, every week, spent finding your place again.
The study in question. Harvard Business Review, August 2022.
What the two numbers are for
The sticky note doesn’t tell you to build anything. If the numbers came out small and nothing hurts, change nothing. Genuinely. You’ll have spent five minutes confirming your stack earns its keep, and that’s a fine outcome and a common one.
But if the yearly number made you sit back, hold it against the build shelf. The middle shelf, the tool that fixes your “one thing,” runs about a month of the stack you just added up. The whole operation, owned outright, runs about a year of it, and I’ve shown that math along with my own company’s worksheet, where the answer was twenty-two tools replaced by one app.
Five minutes, two numbers, one sticky note. If you want a second pair of eyes on yours, book a call and bring it. I’ll tell you honestly which parts are worth owning, which subscriptions deserve to stay, and whether the right answer is to change nothing at all. There’s no rush either way. The sticky note will keep.