The Mistakes That Cost More Than the Budget

When a project isn't working, people almost always look at the spend. Yet the biggest waste is rarely there: it's in decisions taken without criteria and revised before producing any data.

Changing direction every month

Every change wipes out the learning. After three months of monthly changes you don't have three experiments: you have zero readable results and an audience that never understood what you do.

Not deciding who decides

A project without a clear owner produces endless revisions, because everyone involved steps in at a different moment. The cost isn't the budget: it's the time and quality lost in the handovers.

The other recurring mistakes

• Measuring everything and deciding nothing on the basis of those numbers.
• Building on a channel you don't control, without collecting contacts of your own.
• Promising in your communication what the organisation can't deliver.
• Postponing the boring things, which are usually the ones holding everything else up.

The remedy

Write down beforehand what you'll do, for how long, and what you'll treat as sufficient. It's half a page and it's worth more than any measurement tool, because it removes the option of rewriting the criterion after seeing the result.

The worst damage isn't spending badly: it's changing your mind before finding out whether the first idea worked.