The Situation
G&A labor was running at roughly 15% of revenue. Best-in-class benchmark for the category was closer to 8%. On a $20M-per-month operating base, that delta represented approximately $120K of monthly excess — $1.4M annualized — flowing through the books and treated as “normal cost of doing business.”
Admin software, merchant processing fees, and general operating overhead had grown over a decade of incremental decisions, none of which had ever been reviewed against external comparable companies.
What CEI did
Benchmarked the cost structure category-by-category against best-in-class peers: G&A labor, admin software, merchant fees, facility cost, sales and marketing spend.
Quantified the gap per category in dollars and basis points of revenue, so leadership could see where the structural excess actually lived.
Built the cost reduction roadmap: which categories could be cut immediately, which required structural change, and which were genuinely at-market.
Identified specific actions — software stack consolidation, merchant processor renegotiation, role-by-role G&A organizational review — with dollar values per action and a phased timeline.
$1.4M
Annual G&A Excess Identified
7 Pts
G&A as % of Revenue Above Benchmark
Phased
12-18 Month Capture Roadmap
Leadership had — for the first time — a quantified, sourced, and prioritized list of where the cost structure was carrying excess. The conversation moved from “we should look at costs” to “here is the $1.4M target and the plan to capture it.”
In Their Words
“We had been talking about cutting costs for years. CEI gave us the number, the categories, and the order. We stopped talking and started cutting.”
— CEO | Confidential Client