Step one: get everything on one page
Pull the last three months of bank and card statements and list every marketing charge — platform spend, agencies, freelancers, software, sponsorships, print, the radio spot your cousin talked you into. One row each, with the monthly amount.
Do not tidy or interpret yet. Completeness first.
Step two: sort into three buckets
Bucket A: money that went to a platform or publisher to show your message. Bucket B: money paid to humans and software to run it. Bucket C: money you cannot categorize.
Bucket C is the most interesting bucket. It is usually 5 to 15 percent of total spend and it is almost always waste that nobody owns.
Step three: find the duplication
Look for two vendors doing overlapping work, two tools with the same core function, and any channel being bought twice through different paths. Also look for retainers with unused deliverables — a monthly report nobody reads is a line item.
Circle every duplicate. Do not act yet.
Step four: compute one ratio
Bucket B divided by the total. That is your overhead ratio. Write it down; it is the single most useful number in this exercise. Under 25 percent, healthy. Over 40 percent, you are funding management rather than marketing.
Step five: cut, then move
Cancel bucket C entirely and the duplicates you circled. Then move that money into whichever channel currently produces your cheapest customer — not the newest channel, and not the one you find most interesting.
Most businesses recover 10 to 20 percent of total marketing spend in the first pass, with no reduction in output.