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Interactive report · Marketing operations

Most Marketing Teams Aren't Underfunded.
They're Just Slow.


And slow is expensive.

It shows up as wasted budget. Missed revenue. Burned-out operators stuck in review loops.

You can feel it — but you can't see the number. This report makes it visible.

Answer 14 quick questions about how your team actually works. The numbers speak for themselves — what it's costing you, and where speed creates the most leverage.

quiz 14 questions schedule ~3 minutes assessment Personalised report
Time & Meetings
How many hours a week do you spend on status and reporting?

Include weekly reports, 1:1 updates, dashboard checks, and any time spent gathering information that already exists somewhere.

10hours / week
2h8h15h22h30h
Strategic vs. Reactive Time
What percentage of your week is spent reacting and firefighting?

Chasing updates, responding to requests, attending unplanned meetings, fixing things that should work. Be honest.

60% reactive
10%30%50%70%90%
Team Size
How many people report directly to you?

Count only direct reports, not the full team. These are the people whose work you are responsible for reviewing.

Campaign Coverage
How many campaigns is your team running each month?

Count all active campaigns — paid, email, content, lifecycle. If it has performance metrics someone is responsible for, count it.

Budget & Spend
What's your total monthly campaign budget?

Include all paid media — search, social, display, email sends, sponsorships. The more accurate, the more useful your report.

Experiment Velocity
How many A/B tests or experiments does your team run per month?

Any structured test where you compare two versions — creative, copy, landing page, audience, send time. Not hypotheses, actual tests with results.

Approval Cycles
From idea to live — how many days does a typical campaign take to launch?

Count from the moment someone has a concrete idea to when it's actually live and serving impressions.

Data Blindness
How long before you typically spot a campaign that's underperforming?

Think about the last time a campaign was silently underperforming — how many days before you noticed or someone told you?

Team Productivity
How often are your reports blocked waiting for you?

Waiting for a decision, approval, review, or context that only you can provide. How many times per week per person?

Onboarding
How long does a new hire take to become fully productive?

Fully productive means they can work independently without needing to ask you how things work. Be honest — most people underestimate this.

Talent & Retention
How many people have left your team in the last 12 months?

Voluntary departures only — people who chose to leave. Not layoffs or performance exits.

Talent Cost
What's the average salary of someone on your team?

A rough midpoint is fine. This helps us calculate the true cost of turnover and idle time across your team.

Campaign Performance
What's your average campaign conversion rate?

The percentage of people who take the desired action — purchase, sign-up, demo request, whatever your primary conversion goal is.

Revenue Value
What's the average value of a conversion — a customer, a deal, an order?

Use average order value, average contract value, or average revenue per customer — whichever makes most sense for your business model.

Flywheel · Personalised Cost Report · Marketing Operations Generated 2025
This is what slow is costing you.

Personalised to your answers. Every number below reflects your time, your budget, your decisions.

Chapter I — The Time Tax§ 01–03

You're paying an invisible tax every week. It doesn't show up on a balance sheet — but it's eating a quarter of your working life. The time tax is what happens when knowing what's going on takes longer than doing something about it. Status meetings, dashboard trawls, Slack threads asking "where are we on this?" — none of it is strategy, none of it is creative, and none of it moves the needle. Yet it devours your week before Monday is over.

What
The hours you spend gathering information that already exists somewhere
Why
Every hour you spend on status is an hour not spent on growth
When
Weekly — 52 weeks of reporting debt per year
How
Red = your numbers. Green = the benchmark you should be hitting.
01Status Hours
Your hours lost to status per year
520h
of your year spent on information retrieval
% of week on status
25%
vs. 8% benchmark for high-performing teams
02Week Breakdown
Your 40-hour week — where it actually goes
Status & Reporting
10h
Admin & Coord.
Meetings
Strategic Work
You're left with only 15h per week for the work that actually moves numbers.
03Reactive Load
% of your week spent reactive
60%
of your week firefighting, chasing, responding

Top-performing leaders spend under 30% reactively. You're at 60% — that means most of your week is spoken for before you make a single strategic decision.

Chapter II — The Coverage Problem§ 04–05

You can't optimise what you can't see — and right now, you're flying blind on more campaigns than you think. The coverage problem isn't about headcount — it's about your attention bandwidth. Your team might be juggling two or three campaigns each, and the math works on paper. But campaigns don't fail loudly. They fail quietly, burning your budget for days or weeks before you notice the ROAS has cratered or the creative has fatigued. The real question isn't "how many campaigns are we running?" It's "how many am I actually able to watch?"

What
The gap between campaigns you're running and campaigns you're actually monitoring
Why
Blind campaigns burn your budget silently — for weeks at a time
When
The moment your attention is split across more than 2 campaigns each
How
Red dots = campaigns no one is watching. Green dots = actively managed.
04Team & Campaign Load
Campaigns per person
2.0
Running blind
7
You've got 6 people across 12 campaigns. Without automated signals, an estimated 60% have issues you won't catch for weeks.
Campaign visibility this month
Blind7 Visible5
051:1 Status Cost
Your hours in 1:1s on status / yr
62h
That's 7.8 days of your year on updates that should be automated
Chapter III — The Budget Leak§ 06–07

Your money doesn't disappear. It drips. The budget leak is the compound cost of delayed optimisation — the fourteen days a campaign runs unoptimised because you didn't have time to pull the report, and the three weeks it takes to move from "we should test that" to "it's live." Multiply those blind days by your monthly spend and the number stops being abstract. You're not spending too much. You're spending too slow to course-correct.

What
Your budget lost to slow detection and slow launch cycles
Why
An estimated 19% of your spend is wasted before you can intervene
When
Every day between "something's wrong" and "you fixed it"
How
The speed gap shows how many times faster Flywheel moves from brief to live.
06Where Your Budget Goes
Monthly allocation — estimated
Performing
Underperforming
Wasted
Annual waste
$114K
of your budget lost to delayed optimisation
Blind days per campaign
14 days
running unoptimised before action
07Approval Drag
Days from idea to live
14 days
Flywheel cycle time
Hours
Speed gap
28×
faster from brief to live
Chapter IV — The Velocity Gap§ 08–09

You don't need better ideas. You need to test more ideas, faster. The leaders who win don't have higher hit rates — they have higher at-bats. When you're running one or two experiments a month, you're not learning; you're guessing with extra steps. The velocity gap is the distance between how fast you iterate today and how fast the market rewards iteration. Every experiment you don't run is a winning variant you'll never find, a customer insight you'll never have, a compounding advantage your competitor discovers first.

What
The gap between your current test velocity and what you could be running
Why
At a 25% win rate, every 4 tests you run = 1 growth breakthrough
When
Monthly — each test you miss is a learning that never feeds the next one
How
The column chart shows your pace vs. average, top quartile, and with Flywheel.
08Experiment Velocity
Your tests / year
12
With Flywheel
96
1
You
3–4
Avg
9–10
Top 25%
8
+Flywheel
09Wins Missed
Growth wins never found / yr
27
at 25% win rate vs. 10/mo pace
Experiments missed
108
Team Blockers
Team hrs idle / week
36h
Annual idle cost
$74K
in lost productive capacity
Chapter V — The People Cost§ 10–12

The most expensive line item on your team isn't salary. It's friction. It's the twelve weeks a new hire spends learning tribal knowledge that lives in someone's head instead of a system. It's the $56K true cost of replacing someone who left — not because of comp, but because the work felt like treading water. And it's the revenue you'll never see because nobody had time to test whether a 1% conversion lift was sitting inside a subject line nobody tried. People costs aren't just what you pay people. They're what it costs when people can't do their best work.

What
The hidden cost of onboarding, attrition, and unrealised talent potential
Why
Turnover costs 75% of salary — and the knowledge loss is permanent
When
Every hire, every departure, every quarter without structured testing
How
Amber = recoverable drag. Red = sunk cost. Green = upside waiting to be captured.
10Ramp & Onboarding
Output lost per hire
480h
Total ramp cost / yr
$22K
Each hire spends 12 weeks learning undocumented processes. Flywheel's playbooks cut that by half.
11Turnover Cost
True cost per departure
$56K
recruiting + ramp + lost output
Annual turnover cost
$56K
75% of salary — the real price of one exit.
12Revenue Upside
Value of 1% CVR improvement
$37K
additional revenue per year
Unrealised annual upside
$74K
from untested variants sitting idle
The full picture
This is what slow costs you.

Based on your answers — total estimated annual impact.

$0
Total annual cost
all damage areas
0
Experiments
never run
0
Growth wins
undiscovered
0h
Hours lost
to status / yr
Annual cost breakdown
Wasted ad spend
Team idle cost
Turnover cost
Revenue upside
Stop paying the slow tax.

Flywheel closes the gap — starting with whichever lever you need most.

* All figures are estimates based on industry benchmarks. Experiment win rates: CXL Institute & HBR 2023–24. Salary benchmarks: LinkedIn 2024. Turnover: SHRM 2024.