Modeled Example · Not a Client Engagement
$153,400 in Findable Waste: a 210-Person Civil Engineering Consultancy
Picture a Denver-based civil engineering consultancy with 210 employees across Denver and Phoenix offices, carrying approximately $850,000 in annual software spend. Costs have climbed steadily since the second office opened, and no one owns the full stack. Here is what a review typically finds at a company matching this profile.
What a Review Like This Finds
Unused CRM Licenses
62 active seats tied to employees who had left or transferred between offices, going back 16 months. Nobody had been reviewing seats across both locations together.
$38,400/yr
Overlapping Project Management Tools
The Phoenix office never fully migrated off its legacy PM platform after standardizing on a newer tool firm-wide. Both contracts stayed active.
$26,800/yr
Fragmented AI Subscriptions
Seven separate AI tools were running across engineering, business development, and admin with no central license. Consolidating to one enterprise plan covered every user. See our guide to cutting AI subscription costs for how to find this kind of waste yourself.
$34,200/yr
E-Signature Overbilling
The firm was on an enterprise e-signature tier with capacity far beyond actual document volume. Downgrading to business tier covered usage with room to spare.
$14,600/yr
Dormant Legacy Cloud Storage
A cloud file storage subscription predating the firm's Microsoft 365 migration had been auto-renewing for two years, unused.
$19,800/yr
Unused Video Conferencing Webinar Add-On
A webinar tier purchased firm-wide had not been used in over a year. The standard tier covers actual usage.
$11,400/yr
Billing Error Recovery
A vendor had applied the wrong renewal rate across both office contracts.
$8,200 (one-time)
Total Identified in This Example
$153,400
Modeled first-year savings, ~18% of annual software spend. In a real engagement, our contingency fee applies only to savings you confirm and action.
What That Money Buys Back
For a firm this size, $153,400 a year covers a new business development hire plus the conference and bid-travel budget for two new state markets.
The pattern behind this example: firms grow by adding offices, not by cleaning up what each office already has running. Nobody has the full picture until someone builds it.
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