The Silent Tax on Your Revenue
How many taxes do you pay per year? Taxes on your house, taxes on your income, taxes on the food and merchandise you purchase. We’re all sick of it.
As business owners of growing companies, there’s another tax against our businesses that goes unnoticed until it smacks you in the face. It goes unnoticed because this tax isn’t a line item on your profit and loss statement and it’s nothing your CPA is going to ask about come tax season.
It’s the tax on poorly built operations and the cost of a marketing engine you outgrew years ago.
The Growing Pains of 50-200 Person Companies
You see, in the beginning stages of growing a business, it’s all about the hustle. We’re glued to our phones and computers, drafting up proposals at the speed of light, and looking for ways to grow, grow, grow.
And it’s fun.
Then you cross the 50 employee milestone.
That hustle? That just became your biggest threat.
By 50 employees, you’re building out sales and marketing departments. And one of the biggest revenue stalls boils down to misalignment across sales and marketing. This can cost companies upwards of 10% in annual recurring revenue. If you’re making $5M in revenue, that’s $500,000 out the door that can pretty easily be recovered.
What drives us insane? Most leadership teams in companies are well aware their teams are misaligned. What they’re unaware of is how much it’s costing them.
How do you get rid of the silent revenue tax?
The key here, is shifting from implicit coordination to explicit orchestration.
Implicit coordination is where everyone just knows what to do. You see this in early stage startups. Everyone is fully “bought in” and helping to build the company brick by brick. They know what to do because they’re the ones who built it from the ground up, or they work closely enough with leadership to have a 360 degree view.
When you pass 50 employees, you now face a new level of complexity in your business. It’s not necessarily that people aren’t “bought in”, but these people weren’t with you from Day 1. And they’re likely being trained by people that weren’t there from Day 1.
If you don’t have explicit orchestration, everyone is on a different page. At this point, what you need to build is a sustainable machine.
Our team worked with a professional services firm doing $30M in revenue in 2025. When they came to us, the first yellow flag we caught is that we were their fourth marketing agency. “Nobody has ever been able to nail our messaging,” the CMO explained. We engaged them in a six week discovery pilot and quickly discovered messaging was never their issue.
The issues we found were:
They paid $2,300 monthly for a fancy CRM. Their sales team took the lead list from the CRM and exported it to Excel. When we asked why, they had no answer. Marketing leads accrued data in the CRM that sales never looked at.
When asking marketing what metric they evaluated their work against, their answer was website traffic. When asked what they used to track lead quality and quantity, their answer was, “sales does that”.
When asking both sales and marketing their definition of a high quality lead, we got multiple different responses.
These aren’t difficult fixes. But they require time, planning, and an expert’s guidance to ensure that changes are made and those changes stick.
Our team created an entire whitepaper that outlines:
The revenue tax
The four pillars of a scalable marketing operation
How to develop a scalable infrastructure
24-week blueprint to solid RevOps
If you’d like a copy, shoot an email to hello@ericastatly.com and our Founder & CEO, Erica, will ship it your way.
