In one of my very first decisions as Director of Communications at the National Auctioneers Association, we discovered and went with a decision to cut the association’s revered Auctioneer magazine publication budget by $10,000 annually.
All it took was being willing to switch off a nearly decade-long relationship with a printer – one who was delivering everything promised.
What happened next?
The executive director who treats every budget line as a question — is this the best use of this resource for what we’re trying to accomplish? — produces different organizational outcomes than the one who treats the budget as a constraint to be managed.
Over the next several years, NAA’s publication won 13 MARCOM Awards — 4 Platinum and 9 Gold.
I mention this not as a flex but as a point worth examining, because the instinct in most organizations is to assume that quality and cost move in the same direction. Cut the budget and quality falls. Raise the budget and quality rises.
I’d offer that assumption is wrong more often than it’s right.
What the Cut Actually Required
The $10,000 annual reduction didn’t happen by producing a worse publication. It happened by examining every cost line in the production process and asking a question that most organizations don’t ask often enough: does this expenditure directly contribute to quality, or does it contribute to habit?
A significant portion of what organizations spend on communications and publications falls into the second category. Vendors who were selected years ago under different conditions and never rebid. Production processes that were designed around legacy constraints that no longer exist. Overhead absorbed by a print budget because “that’s how magazines work” — regardless of whether the specific decisions driving that overhead are still the right ones.
The audit that produced the $10,000 saving wasn’t an exercise in cutting quality. It was an exercise in identifying what was actually driving quality and protecting that — while eliminating what was driving cost without contributing to the outcome.
The Organizational Behavior This Requires
Getting to a result like this requires a specific kind of organizational behavior that isn’t natural in most environments: the willingness to examine and change things that are working adequately, well, or even beyond expectation.
Most organizations reserve process scrutiny for things that are broken.
If the publication is coming out on time, winning awards, and generating member engagement, there’s no external pressure to examine how it’s produced or what it costs. The pressure to examine it has to come from a different orientation — not “what’s broken?” but “what’s right, and is it as right as it could be for what it costs?”
That question is harder to motivate and harder to act on than crisis-driven scrutiny. It requires a leader who is willing to introduce productive friction into processes that are functioning, in service of an efficiency that won’t be visible until the work is done.
What Resource Stewardship Actually Is
Resource stewardship is often discussed as a constraint — managing budgets, staying within allocations, avoiding waste. That’s a part of it.
But the more substantive version of resource stewardship is active: looking for places where organizational resources aren’t producing maximum value, and making the changes that close that gap.
In small associations where budgets are perpetually tight and the margin for inefficiency is genuinely small, this kind of active stewardship is a leadership differentiator. The executive director who treats every budget line as a question — is this the best use of this resource for what we’re trying to accomplish? — produces different organizational outcomes than the one who treats the budget as a constraint to be managed.
The $10,000 mattered not because it was an incredibly large number but because it represented resources that got redeployed toward things the organization actually needed. Every dollar freed from habit-driven expenditure is a dollar available for mission-driven investment.
The question is: Are you looking for those dollars, or are you waiting for the budget crisis that makes looking (and acting) unavoidable?
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