What Poor Communication is Really Costing your Business

Every business owner has asked it. Maybe you’ve asked it this week: What do I actually get when I invest in marketing and communications?

For a long time, the honest answer was “it depends.” That line between communications and revenue was faint. Drawn in pencil. Hard to justify on a spreadsheet.

That’s changing fast.

In this episode, Erin breaks down the research that finally puts real numbers on what poor communication infrastructure costs — and what fixing it actually returns. Spoiler: the math is going to bother you in the best possible way.

What’s covered in this episode:

McKinsey research from 2020 found that executives spend about 40% of their week making decisions. Of that, 60% are decisions they shouldn’t be touching at all — and the root cause is weak communication infrastructure. That’s 20% of your senior leaders’ time, every single week, gone.

Axios followed up in 2025 with a dollar figure: just under $55,000 USD per senior employee, per year, lost to ineffective communication. And 48% of C-suite leaders admitted they got more involved in projects than they should have — because of communication breakdown.

That’s the leak. And you won’t see it on your balance sheet until you fix it.

Erin also walks through two real client stories where the problem looked like a marketing problem, a PR problem, a “we need better launch campaigns” problem — and wasn’t any of those things. The breakdown was upstream. The fix wasn’t a better press release or a busier intern. It was a better communications infrastructure.

She talks about the BRIDGE Framework, why the CCO is moving from a VP-in-function role to a seat at the C-suite table, and what it actually looks like when your communications keeps pace with your operations.

Whether you’re running a five-person team or a fifty-person organization, this episode gives you a way to put a number on a problem that used to be impossible to quantify.