If we asked you what the most expensive thing in your company is, you’d probably say: 

Payroll. Cloud spend. Sales commissions. Customer acquisition. That one vendor contract nobody remembers signing. 

Reasonable answers. 

Also wrong. 

The most expensive thing in your company is the thing you never budget for, never track properly, and somehow accept as “normal.” 

Not knowing. 

Not knowing what’s going on. 
Not knowing what’s actually been agreed. 
Not knowing what’s blocking progress. 
Not knowing who owns the follow-up. 
Not knowing what changed since last week. 

It doesn’t show up as a line item. 

It shows up as waste disguised as work. 

The Invisible Invoice 

“Not knowing” charges you in a few predictable ways: 

• You pay in meetings 

• You pay in rework 

• You pay in delays 

• You pay in missed follow-ups 

• You pay in churn 

• You pay in burned-out managers 

• You pay in decisions made too late 

And the worst part is you keep paying it because it feels like a people problem. 

“People need to communicate more.” 
“We need tighter process.” 
“We need better discipline.” 
“We need more accountability.” 

No. 

Most of the time, you don’t have an accountability problem.

You have a visibility problem. 

Why It Gets So Expensive at Series A 

Early-stage companies move fast and break things. Fine. 

But at Series A, a new thing happens: 

You start hiring ahead of certainty. 
You start scaling systems that were never designed to scale. 
You start shipping while rebuilding the plane mid-air. 

Which means you start living in a permanent fog. 

And fog is expensive. 

Because when leaders can’t see clearly, they do what humans do in fog: 

They slow down. They double-check. They hedge. They add layers. They schedule meetings “just to align.” They ask for updates “just to be safe.” 

Suddenly, your speed advantage becomes death by caution. 

The Coordination Tax (That Everyone Pretends Isn’t a Tax) 

Here’s the part that will annoy you because it’s true: 

A lot of your company’s “work” is just people trying to find out what other people are doing. 

• “Any update?” 

• “Did we send that?” 

• “Who’s on this?” 

• “What did we decide?” 

• “Can you forward that thread?” 

• “Where’s the latest version?” 

• “Is this blocked?” 

• “Are we still doing this?” 

That’s coordination. 

And coordination isn’t bad — it’s necessary. 

But when coordination becomes the default mode of operating, your company starts paying a tax it cannot afford. 

The Two Places the Money Actually Leaks 

Most leaders assume waste happens in the obvious places: 

Overstaffing. Bad tools. Inefficient processes. 

But the most consistent leaks come from two quieter places: 

1) Decisions made with incomplete context 
You pick the wrong priority. 
You chase the wrong deal. 
You escalate the wrong fire. 
You delay the right decision. 

2) Commitments made and then forgotten 
A customer asked for something. 
A teammate said yes. 
Everyone moved on. 

Then the request disappears into the void. 

Which is just another way of saying: you paid for not knowing. 

Why This Is a Leadership Problem (Not a Team Problem) 

When a team member doesn’t know, one task gets delayed. 

When leadership doesn’t know, the whole company drifts. 

The expensive part is what leaders do because they can’t see: 

• they add meetings 

• they add process 

• they add check-ins 

• they add approval layers 

• they add “just in case” work 

This is how startups accidentally turn into slow corporations while still being broke. 

All because “not knowing” forces you to overcompensate. 

The Hard Truth 

If you’re honest, you can feel this in your calendar. 

How many meetings exist because: 

• you don’t trust the status 

• you don’t trust the follow-through 

• you don’t trust the reporting 

• you don’t trust that you’ll hear about problems early 

Meetings are often just a substitute for visibility. 

And they’re expensive because they scale the worst way possible: 

One leader’s uncertainty becomes 10 people’s lost hour. 

Where Belt Comes In 

Belt is built for the most expensive problem in modern work: 

The cost of not knowing. 

It closes the gap between what people say is happening and what’s actually happening by building the work picture from where work really lives: 

Email. Meetings. Calendar. Threads. Transcripts. Attachments. 

So you’re not paying for ambiguity with: 

• more meetings 

• more manual prep 

• more status theatre 

• more “any updates?” 

You get signal: 

• what was decided 

• what’s required next 

• what’s blocked 

• who owes what 

• what changed 

• what needs follow-up

And once you can see clearly, the weird thing is… you don’t need to “manage harder.” 

You just stop paying for fog. 

In 2026, the most expensive thing in your company isn’t payroll. 

It’s running the business on partial information and calling it normal. 

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