Speaking of spending wisely, are you investing enough in your own reputation? You know you need a personal brand, but running an organization comes first. Taplio (Affiliate link) bridges that gap. It automates the heavy lifting of LinkedIn, from writing posts to analyzing data, so you can build authority on autopilot.
P.S. This is the tool I use to automate my LinkedIn growth
For the last 2 years (plus!), marketing teams have operated under a single, crushing mandate: Do more with less. Bring agency work in-house! Swap headcount for AI tools! Audit every line item in the tech stack to prove efficiency!
But looking back, the most damaging inefficiency was the one that’s never been tracked. The Ego Spend.
I’ve worked inside massive, influential businesses that hired the best talent in the world. On paper, these people were hired to build strategy and solve complex problems. In reality, they were being paid to manage anxiety.
You see it at every rung of the ladder:
The Junior Level (The Scrubber): I’ve watched marketers spend weeks “sanitizing” a deck by softening language because they knew a specific VP would react emotionally to the hard truth. They weren’t solving for the market; they were solving for one person’s mood.
The Middle Management (The Performer): We all know the “Comment-to-Make-a-Comment” guy. This is the person who feels they must speak in every meeting to signal they are “management material.” They derail a decision for 20 minutes with a nonsensical “build” or a devil’s advocate question, just to get their voice heard. That 20 minutes, multiplied by the 8 salaries in the room, is pure waste.
The Executive Level (The Vanity Project): I’ve seen entire marketing teams diverted from revenue-generating work to help launch a CMO’s pet project that was loosely tied to business priorities. I’ve seen GTM strategies delayed because a Founder wanted to attend a conference that had zero overlap with the actual buyer.
The result? We stopped strategizing for the prospective client. We started strategizing for the loudest person in the conference room.
These cultures think they’re rewarding impact. Nah, they’re rewarding compliance. They neutralize the truth before it can reach the top.
And every time a project is delayed to accommodate an internal feeling rather than an external reality, you are burning capital.
I call this The Safety Tax. It is the gap between the strategy you should ship, and the watered-down version that finally gets approved.
No shade, but you cannot fix this with a “Radical Candor” workshop. You can’t fix it with a culture deck. You have to identify exactly where the tax is being collected.
Good news: This can be accomplished in 15 minutes. You don't need a spreadsheet to measure the safety tax. You just need to look for three specific behaviors in your next strategy review.
Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of B2B Trust Lab.
