Your most expensive line item is a bad contract

The most expensive thing in your business is not payroll. It is not rent. It is your bad contracts.

Ambiguous deliverables in a vendor agreement. A client contract with no payment trigger. A partnership where neither side knows who owns the output. An employment arrangement that exists entirely in someone's memory.

This is not an edge case. It is the normal operating state of most early and mid-stage companies, and it is fine, until it is not.

The moment a relationship changes, when the money slows, when priorities shift, when someone new comes in, you find out fast whether your agreements say what you thought they said. The cost of finding out they do not is always higher than the cost of getting them right before it mattered.

Which relationship in your business is running on trust and a handshake right now? Start there.