Last week, we unpacked the hidden costs of telecom. We talked about legacy accounts, outdated tech, and downtime that quietly drains your business.

This week, we’re going to unpack how to calculate your costs. That is where the Vendor Drain Equation comes in.

The Vendor Drain Equation

We call it the Vendor Drain Equation, which is from a recent customer video we filmed about how they were stuck with a vendor draining their team:

Hidden Cost = (HpW x E) x 52 x R

Where:

HpW = Average hours per week spent managing bad vendors/partners
E = Number of employees affected
52 = Weeks per year
R = Average hourly rate ($) (fully loaded cost of an employee, including salary, benefits, overhead)

This simple equation annualizes the real financial impact of wasted time.

Step 1: Time Waste Calculation

Say one manager spends 10 hours per week chasing vendors/following up/looking for info/sitting on hold/etc… That’s 40 hours per month or 520 hours per year.

At an all-in cost of $60 per hour, that equals $31,200 per year wasted. And that is just one person.

Now imagine it is three managers. Or a whole department slowed down by broken processes. The numbers compound quickly.

Step 2: Redeployment Value

Now assume you remove the waste:

Redundant Accounts → 20–30% savings on the bill itself (direct dollars saved).
- If your telecom spend is $100K, you just found $20K–$30K.
Old Tech Cleanup → another 20–30% efficiency bump (lower support tickets, faster troubleshooting, no “zombie” lines).
Time Savings → let’s say you reclaim 20% of your IT team’s week:
- Instead of vendor-chasing, they invest in:
  - Researching new opportunities (future savings/revenue).
  - Building internal tools (process efficiency).
  - Refining workflows (retention of employees + reduced stress).

And when that reclaimed time is redeployed into higher-value work such as research, innovation, and customer experience, the ROI multiplies.

The Bottom Line

Last week we shared that the biggest expense is not always the bill you pay. It is the opportunities you miss.

This week we have given you a way to measure it. Use this formula across your business. Find the waste. Quantify it. Then ask the better question: what could my team achieve if we got those hours and dollars back?

Because cost-cutting alone will not make you more competitive. Redeploying wasted time into work that compounds is how you win.

Want to talk through what this formula looks like for your business?

Every company’s numbers are different, and the hidden costs are not always obvious. We are happy to walk you through an example and help you identify where wasted time and dollars may be hiding in your organization.

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