You go through your numbers each month. You sit down with your team and review what’s working. You poke at your processes when something breaks. That’s normal business hygiene.
But there’s one thing on the books almost no one runs a proper audit on — and it’s the one most likely to be quietly costing you money.
It’s you. Specifically, your energy.
The hidden line item in your P&L
I’ve been in business long enough to notice a pattern. The weeks I sleep badly, eat rubbish, and skip my walk are the same weeks I send the email that lands the wrong way. Or I sit on a quote for three days when it should have gone out in three hours. Or I miss something obvious in a client conversation that I’d have caught when I was sharper.
None of that shows up on a balance sheet. But the cost is real. A deal that drifts. A client who feels half-listened-to. A reply that creates a problem instead of closing one.
You can’t see it in your numbers, but it’s in there. Every time.
No tactic survives a flat battery
Here’s the part people don’t want to hear: there’s no strategy, framework, or new hire that fixes a depleted owner. I see business owners trying to out-work, out-tool, or out-source their way around tiredness. It doesn’t work. The decisions still have to come through you, and the quality of those decisions tracks the quality of your sleep, your food, and your movement more closely than most of us care to admit.
And ironically, the tools we now have should make this easier, not harder. I use Copilot in Outlook to do the first pass on long replies, and Copilot in Teams to recap a meeting I half-listened to because the day got away from me. That’s not laziness — that’s protecting the limited number of sharp hours I actually have. Letting the machine do the rummaging means I get to spend my energy on the call that matters, not the inbox triage.
The same goes for the weekly running of the business. A clean Planner board, a proper SharePoint home for your documents, a few Power Automate flows handling the boring approvals — these aren’t productivity bling. They’re how you stop bleeding decision-making capacity on things that don’t deserve it.
Treat yourself like the asset you are
Run the audit on yourself the same way you’d run it on the business.
How did you sleep this week? When did you last move? What does the food in your kitchen actually look like? When was the last full day you took off — not “worked from home in a t-shirt”, but actually off?
I’m not pretending I get this right every week. I don’t. But when I notice the slide, I treat it the way I’d treat a leaking margin: stop, look at the inputs, fix what’s fixable. Block the walk in the calendar. Push the late meeting. Let Copilot draft the thing tonight so I can be in bed at a reasonable hour.
The business sits on top of you. If the foundation is shaky, nothing built on it is going to hold.
Audit the owner first.
CIAOPS 