683: (Solo) The Expense Audit That Could Save Your Brand Thousands This Year

**Nathan Chan** (0:01)
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Welcome back to another episode of the Foundr to Foundr solo podcast where I share all the lessons I've learned from building Foundr over the past 12, 13 years. So I want to talk about something today that most founders put off and it's not sexy. It's not exciting. This is not a new growth hack. And it's not going like viral on a Twitter thread, but I think this is one of the highest leverage things you can do for your e-com brand right now. I know, you know, businesses are hurting. I know things are changing in the economy and I've been there, right? I've gone through tough times from a cashflow based perspective. And I want to walk you through my go-to line by line, going through your expenses, because here's the thing, right? I never forget this once a mentor told me, Nathan, a dollar saved is a dollar earned. Now, depending on your margins for your brand, it probably is more than a dollar earned. It's probably a dollar and 30 cents or a dollar and 40 cents, a dollar and 50 cents earned, depending on your margins. So I cannot stress this enough. If you are listening to this episode, whether you're driving in the car, whether you're in transit somewhere, I want you to pull over, please take note and implement these things in your business. Run the audit and I promise you, we will make you, depending on where your business is at, I will make you, in terms of dollar saved, dollar earned, thousands if not tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars saved over a year's period.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:35)
Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan.

**Nathan Chan** (2:49)
Let's kick things off. I'm just going to go through line by line. I'm going to hit you. You're going to feel like you're drinking from a fire hose, but this is a good one. So this is something that I've had to do in the past. And it's been a really, really, really fruitful exercise. So let's just kick things off. The first one is Shopify app bloat and SaaS subscriptions. This is the first place that people tend to go. It's probably the most obvious one when it comes to saving on costs. You know, software is an obvious starting point. Most e-commerce businesses, they accumulate tools over time. I can tell you right now, Foundr pays for like over 100 different tools still to this day. At peak, it was like 150 It was absolutely insane. So the data shows us that on average, a growing store has between 15 to 30 apps installed, but they're actively only using eight of them. So that's the first place, right? Each tool can be sneaky and $30 a month here, $30 a month there, $90 here, $50 here. It actually adds up. And what you'll find is your team isn't actually always using these tools. So if you're a solo founder, go through them line by line and really use AI to go through like line by line and see if you can actually use Claude code to replicate these tools. If it's not going to be too hard of a build, not going to be too difficult, that is something that I cannot absolutely stress enough. So that's the first piece of the puzzle. What can you remove completely and your business can go without? Then the second piece of that puzzle is I want you to contact every single software tool and ask them what they can do for you, in terms of negotiation saving. You would be surprised when you ask these software tools, how much they can actually move. Now obviously, there's some room always for them because they sell annual software licenses. So they can help you on a monthly, right? So I guarantee you every single one will want to retain you. So see what you can do once you've got all of them removed, you've gone for the process with AI, what can Claude code replace? And there's some simple ones for sure, like that you can definitely replace with Claude code. And then depending on the size of your business, now we actually have at Foundr a dedicated owner, not just our head of finance, but a dedicated owner of our SaaS tools. And they actually have a KPI to keep that monthly number under and then approval has to go through the finance department if we're gonna stretch it beyond it. So there's the AI piece, then there's having an owner, depending on the size of your business, and then going and negotiating every single one. You would be surprised of the critical ones that you need, they will move. Another one that you wanna look at is your 3PL and shipping costs.