Direct cost gets the scrutiny. It is large, it is visible, and someone senior already owns it. So that is where the attention goes. The savings tend to sit somewhere quieter.

They sit in indirect spend. Facilities and utilities. Professional services, the legal, advisory and audit fees. Marketing services. Travel and expense. On their own, none of these lines looks worth a leadership conversation. Totalled, they often dwarf categories the business actively manages. Indirect spend is fragmented by design. Each function buys its own, in amounts small enough to clear approval without a second look. It is invisible because it is spread thin. In the accounts it disappears into buckets named Operations, Administration, or Other. Once a cost lands in Other, it has left the conversation.

The fix does not touch headcount and does not need a project. Pick one indirect category this quarter. Give it a single named owner. Ask what the business is actually buying, from whom, and whether anyone has tested the market lately. Most mid-market CFOs find enough in a single category to fund a senior hire they had assumed they could not afford.

The question worth taking into your next leadership meeting. Which of our costs sit in a category owned by no one. Start there.

If your cost base is on your mind right now, here's the move. Era Group runs a complimentary spend review for a small number of Australian CFOs each quarter. It starts as a conversation. Nothing to prepare, nothing to share. We look at where your costs actually sit and where the pressure is coming from. Reply to this email. I'll find a time.

A national healthcare services group in Brisbane ran an across-the-board pay review last year to get ahead of wage pressure. It was fair, it was defensible, and it spent most of the budget on the people least likely to leave.

That is the trap. The market-wide review sounds like the disciplined answer. Benchmark to market, move everyone together, hand the board a clean story. It assumes one labour market. There is never just one.

Inside most mid-market businesses, at least three run at once. Roles where supply is loose, admin and junior generalist work, where candidates are available and a blanket rise is a gift to people who could not credibly leave. Roles where supply is tight but mobile, mid-level finance and operations, where market pay is the floor, not the answer. And roles where supply is genuinely broken, specialist trades, senior cyber, hard-to-fill clinical positions, where market is whatever the last candidate accepted and is already out of date.

Treat those three as one and you get the worst of both ends. The loose-supply roles get a raise you never had to give. The broken-supply roles get one you needed a good while ago, at the wrong level. The credibility of the whole exercise gets spent on the wrong people.

The better question is not are we paying market. It is what premium are we paying, for what scarcity, in which roles. The payroll data to answer it already sits in the building. Almost no one reads it that way.

A market review pays everyone fairly and retains no one deliberately. Are you paying a premium for scarcity, or are you just paying.