Onboarding is free. It’s the reason delivery is at capacity.

The cost of getting a new customer working is paid by the delivery team, which is why it never appears in the cost of acquiring them.

By Steve 5 min read
Abstract bridge artwork for Onboarding is free. It’s the reason delivery is at capacity.

A business calculates its customer acquisition cost the standard way: sales and marketing spend over the period, divided by customers won. It divides that by monthly gross margin per customer and gets a payback period. The number looks defensible. It gets presented to the board. Nobody argues with it. Meanwhile, delivery is permanently at capacity, margin on recent cohorts is thinner than on older ones, and the senior people are hard to reach. No single decision caused this. The cost that explains it is real, sizeable and recorded, just not…

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