22 places your Calgary business is leaking money.
This is the checklist I work through on a free 30-minute call. Three pillars, 22 specific checks, each mapped to a typical dollar range. Work through it yourself if you want, or give me 30 minutes and we'll find the real numbers on your books, live.
Chen Deng, OxOne · PMP engineer, Calgary. I run my own company, LAMOSE, on the same checks.
Pillar 01 — Cost Reduction
Cut the costLine-item waste in your tech stack, subscriptions, and recurring spend. Most businesses find leaks here in under 15 minutes.
- 1. List every SaaS you pay monthly — can you name all of them from memory?
If you can't, pull the last 90 days of bank statements. Flag every recurring charge < $300.
Typical find: $200–$900/mo - 2. Identify duplicate tools doing the same job.
Two CRMs. Two email senders. Two analytics tools. One always wins — cancel the rest.
Typical find: $150–$500/mo - 3. Check for annual plans billed as monthly.
Most vendors silently renew at higher monthly rates. Switching to annual = 15–25% off.
Typical find: $100–$400/mo - 4. Find "zombie" subscriptions you stopped using but still pay for.
The ex-assistant's Trello Pro. The "we'll use this next quarter" Zapier tier. Kill them.
Typical find: $100–$600/mo - 5. Audit credit card processing fees.
Stripe/Square baseline is 2.9% + 30¢. If you're above that, renegotiate — anyone doing >$20K/mo in volume qualifies for custom rates.
Typical find: 0.3–0.8% of revenue - 6. Check your domain, hosting, and email provider bundling.
Three separate invoices from three vendors is usually $300–$800/yr of overlap.
Typical find: $25–$70/mo - 7. Cell phone, internet, and insurance contracts over 18 months old.
Call and say "I'm reviewing providers." Re-quote drops are typical.
Typical find: $80–$300/mo
Pillar 02 — Operations Improvement
Fix the operationManual work that shouldn't exist in 2026. Every "we just do it that way" is $40–$80/hour of hidden cost.
- 8. Map your quote-to-cash process. Count the touchpoints.
If it's more than 4 steps, you have a revenue-speed problem, not just a cost problem.
Typical recovery: 3–8 hrs/week - 9. Check for copy-paste work between tools.
Jobber → QuickBooks. Form fills → spreadsheet. Stripe → invoicing. Every copy-paste is an automation candidate.
Typical recovery: 5–12 hrs/week - 10. Review your hiring-vs-automating math.
If you're about to hire admin, check if $500 of automation would do 70% of the job first.
Typical save: $1,500–$4,000/mo avoided hire - 11. Bookkeeping hygiene: how many days behind are you?
More than 14 days = you're blind on cash. Xero/QuickBooks rules + bank feed can keep you current in 30 min/week.
Typical find: 2–4 hrs/week - 12. Invoice follow-up system — do you have one?
AR over 30 days without a reminder is free cash you're financing for your customer. Auto-reminders recover 15–25%.
Typical find: 8–20% AR unlock - 13. Customer communication: phone tag, inbox chaos, missed texts?
One unified inbox (Missive, Front, or custom) + routing rules kills this.
Typical recovery: 3–6 hrs/week - 14. Reporting — does the business run on a weekly one-pager, or on gut?
Without numbers, every decision is a coin flip. A 5-KPI weekly digest costs $0 to set up.
Typical decision-quality lift: priceless - 15. Scheduling, shift reminders, no-shows — any automation?
SMS reminders cut no-shows 30–60%. Airtable + Twilio for under $30/mo handles it.
Typical find: 5–12% revenue recovery
Pillar 03 — AI Adoption
Deploy the AIThe three AI workflows that pay back first. Skip "ChatGPT writes blogs" — that's noise. These move real numbers.
- 16. AI-drafted quotes from inbound leads.
Claude/GPT read the inquiry, pull your price list, produce a polished quote in 30 seconds. Your review takes 1 minute.
Typical recovery: 5–10 hrs/week + higher close rate - 17. AI-generated customer follow-up sequences.
Post-service, post-quote, post-no-show — each gets a templated-but-personalized follow-up. 20–40% of lost leads resurrect.
Typical lift: 10–25% more revenue per lead - 18. Review request automation with smart timing.
Text customer 24h after job done with a one-tap Google review link. 4.9-star average, in 60 days.
Typical lift: 5–15 reviews/mo, ranking boost - 19. Google Ads search terms report — AI-classify wasted spend.
AI labels every search term as "qualified / maybe / waste" in bulk. Negative-keyword list writes itself.
Typical find: 30–40% ad waste recovered - 20. Receipt / bill / document processing via AI extraction.
Snap photo → AI extracts vendor, amount, category, GL code → pushes to QuickBooks.
Typical recovery: 2–5 hrs/week - 21. AI-written internal reports from raw numbers.
"Here's last week's Stripe + Jobber data, write me a 5-bullet summary." Takes 20 seconds. Used to take 45 min.
Typical recovery: 3 hrs/week - 22. AI customer support triage for inbox overwhelm.
Auto-categorize inbound email (quote / support / spam / billing), route to right person, draft replies for review.
Typical recovery: 6–12 hrs/week
Twenty-two checks. Thirty minutes.
Give me 30 minutes on a screen-share and I'll run these checks against your actual business. You leave with a one-page plan and a price, whether you hire me or not.
