Two figures came out of a single conversation with a managing director. His leadership spent ten to fifteen hours a week in internal meetings. Somebody in his business spent five to fifteen hours a week preparing reports and summaries. Neither number surprised him. He had never multiplied either one.
Here is the multiplication. Take the midpoints, 12.5 hours and ten hours. A leadership group of five people at a company of 31, which is a managing director, an operations director and three department heads. Forty six working weeks, allowing for holiday. A loaded hourly cost of 55 euro for leadership and 40 for the mixed group producing reports.
Internal meetings: 158,125 euro a year. Report preparation: 18,400 euro. Total, 176,525 euro, from two answers given in under a minute.
Not all of it is recoverable, and any consultant who tells you otherwise is selling something. A business needs to meet. The portion that disappears is the part spent establishing what happened and reading numbers aloud, which is roughly a third of the meeting time and about four fifths of the report preparation. That comes to 62,158 euro a year, and it is published as the full finding with every assumption shown.
The interesting part is what came next. Asked what else consumed expensive time, the same managing director named six more things without hesitating: chasing follow-ups, onboarding new clients, invoicing and payment chasing, answering the same internal questions, client communication, training staff. Asked how many hours each took, he could not say.
That is the actual finding. Not the 62,000, which is only what two answers happened to be worth. The finding is that a business turning over between two and five million euro could price two of its eight largest drains and not the other six, which means it has been prioritising by instinct. Each of those six sits under one of the three lenses a Cortex audit uses, and each of them is larger than it looks.
The arithmetic above takes ten minutes and needs no consultant. Take your own two answers and multiply them. The number will be larger than you expect, and it will be a floor.
The Cortex AI Audit does this across six steps and five scores. Nine minutes, your figures.