The Expense I Never Saw Coming

When I bought Ruby's, I had a budget. I was proud of it. The loan payment. Beer and liquor. Chips, frozen pizzas, beef jerky. Cable and internet. Utilities. Every normal thing a bar spends money on had a line.

Then we got busy.

The one thing I was completely unprepared for was paper. Toilet paper, napkins, paper towels. I was running to Sam's Club two or three times a week just for toilet paper. It turned into a monster of an expense that wasn't on my list anywhere.

And I still wouldn't buy the cheap stuff. The supply guys would show up with the single-ply and I'd send them back. Only the best for my customers.

Prefer Facebook? Watch the reel there.

Why I still tell this story

I tell it every time I talk to a room of people who want to start a business, because the lesson isn't about paper.

The big costs never surprise you. You planned for them. The loan didn't sneak up on me. The liquor bill didn't sneak up on me. What got me was the thing I never thought to write down, because it seemed too small to matter until it wasn't.

Every business has a toilet paper line. Yours might not be paper. But it's there, and it's costing you whether you budgeted for it or not.

What the toilet paper line looks like now

I run a marketing company now, and I sit down with a lot of small business owners. Nearly every one of them has a version of the same thing hiding in their marketing. Here are the three I see most.

The email that lands in spam

You send a quote or an invoice, the customer says they never got it, and you both shrug and blame the internet. Most of the time it isn't the internet. It's that your domain was never set up to prove your email is really yours. Mail providers have gotten strict about that, and when the proof isn't there, your message goes to spam or gets dropped before it's ever read. Nobody budgets time for this because nobody knows it's a thing. It's a one-time setup, and it's the difference between your email arriving and your email disappearing.

The renewal nobody owns

Your domain name, your hosting, the plugin your website leans on. Each one renews on its own schedule, on a card somebody put in years ago, tied to an email address somebody may not check anymore. When one of them lapses, your site goes dark or your email stops, and you find out from a customer. There's no line in the budget for that because it's not a purchase. It's a chore, and chores without an owner don't get done.

The hours that are wrong

Your Google listing says you're open. You're closed. Somebody drives over, finds a locked door, and leaves a one-star review that outlives the mistake by years. Holiday hours, a new schedule, a shift in the season. The listing doesn't know unless somebody tells it. That's five minutes nobody has on the day it matters.

Write it down

None of these are expensive to fix. They're expensive to ignore, and they're easy to ignore because they don't show up on a statement. That's what made toilet paper such a problem at Ruby's. It never arrived as one big bill I could argue with. It arrived two or three cart-loads at a time.

If you own a business, take ten minutes this week and write your toilet paper lines down. Who owns your domain renewal. Whether your email is authenticated. When your listing hours were last checked. If you don't know the answers, that's the answer.

If you want a second set of eyes, our free page checker at mainstreetaudit.com reads your domain's registration record and tells you when it expires and whether the transfer lock is on. The email and the hours are a phone call. I've been on the other side of this and I'd rather you hear it from me than from a customer.