Resource

The recovery checklist.

An eight-category DIY scan. Surface $22,500 to $30,000 of forward-reallocation potential in a weekend.

The Recovery Checklist

Asset type: PDF, printable front and back on one sheet at 10pt, or 2 pages at 11pt Hosted at: decisive.finance/resources/trapped-capital-recovery-checklist Gate: Email required. Single field, single button. Purpose: Mid-funnel conversion asset. A CEO or CFO walks the list in 20 minutes, finds 6 to 12 live items, books the call. Also carries canon language into every prospect’s hands.

Landing page copy

Headline

The 37 places we surface $22,500 to $30,000 of forward-reallocation potential in a funded tech company’s first 14 days

Subhead

Eight categories. Thirty-seven items. The order we run them, the dollar range we see, and the time-to-recovery on each. Printable, one page front and back.

Body (3 sentences)

This is the exact scan we run on every diagnostic engagement. If you walk it honestly and find fewer than six live items, your company is leaner than its peers. Six or more, and the 30-minute call is the next move.

Primary CTA

Send me the checklist

What happens

  • Email field. One click. PDF sent in under 60 seconds.
  • Triggers Nurture Drip: Recovery Checklist sequence.
  • Tagged “downloaded-recovery-checklist.”

The checklist (content)

Every item includes: [category] • dollar range seen in typical engagement • time-to-recovery. Walk the list. Check any item you suspect is live. If 6 or more items check, book a call.

Category 1: SaaS subscriptions (items 1 to 6)

  1. Duplicated tools across teams. Marketing and sales running two different analytics platforms. Engineering running both Datadog and New Relic. $3K to $9K/year. 14 days.
  2. Free tiers that auto-upgraded without review. Notion, Figma, Loom, Zoom all have this pattern. $2K to $6K/year. 7 days.
  3. Per-seat contracts where active seats are under 50% of licensed seats. Slack, Salesforce, Atlassian, Linear, Monday. $5K to $15K/year. 30 days.
  4. Annual renewals that happened at 125% or more over prior year, with no renegotiation conversation. Anyone over $10K/year who raised without a call. $3K to $12K/year. 30 to 60 days.
  5. Tools no one has opened in 90 days, still paying. Audit login reports on admin consoles. $2K to $8K/year. 7 days.
  6. Legacy tools from a prior product direction. Analytics platform from the last pivot. CRM from the last go-to-market. $3K to $10K/year. 14 days.

Category 2: Cloud infrastructure (items 7 to 12)

  1. On-demand EC2 instances that should be reserved. Typical finding: 30 to 50% savings on committed workload. $3K to $12K/month ongoing. 30 days.
  2. Storage in wrong tier (S3 Standard for data that should be Glacier or Infrequent Access). $500 to $3K/month. 14 days.
  3. Dev and staging environments running 24/7 when they should shut off nights and weekends. $800 to $4K/month. 7 days.
  4. Old RDS instances, snapshots, and load balancers from prior architectures, still billing. $500 to $2K/month. 7 days.
  5. Data egress charges that could be eliminated by CDN or VPC endpoint configuration. $300 to $2K/month. 30 days.
  6. Reserved-instance or Savings Plan commitments expired, never renewed. $1K to $5K/month. 14 days.

Category 3: R&D tax credits (items 13 to 16)

  1. Current-year federal R&D credit not planned. Any US company with qualifying wage and contractor spend. $30K to $150K/year. 60 to 120 days to file.
  2. Amended returns for prior years (up to 3 years back) never filed. $50K to $300K retroactive. 90 to 180 days.
  3. State R&D credit, separate from federal. California, New York, Massachusetts, Texas. Often missed even when federal is filed. $10K to $60K/year. 60 to 120 days.
  4. Payroll tax offset election on federal credit, for pre-revenue or low-revenue companies. Up to $500K/year against FICA. Up to $500K/year. Immediate once filed.

Category 4: AR and cash acceleration (items 17 to 21)

  1. DSO over 45 days on annual-billed customers. Target: under 30. $10K to $40K one-time working capital. 14 to 45 days.
  2. Customers not on ACH or auto-pay when they could be. Reduces DSO, reduces collections load. $2K to $8K/month working capital benefit. 30 days.
  3. Annual contracts billed quarterly with no upfront-payment discount offered. Offer 2% discount for annual upfront. Typical 40% take rate. $10K to $30K one-time. 30 to 90 days.
  4. Credit memos, refunds, or write-offs in AR that have not been cleared in over 60 days. $2K to $8K. 14 days.
  5. Customers in “pending renewal” status past their contract end date, still receiving service. Legal and collections exposure plus uncharged revenue. $5K to $25K one-time plus ongoing. 30 days.

Category 5: Vendor terms (items 22 to 25)

  1. Top 10 vendors on net-30 who would accept net-60 or net-90 with no discount. $10K to $40K working capital. 30 to 60 days.
  2. Annual vendor contracts that auto-renewed in the last 12 months without a renegotiation conversation. $5K to $20K/year. 30 to 90 days.
  3. Vendors whose usage dropped 30% or more but whose contract is at the original volume. Every tool sold with tiered pricing. $3K to $12K/year. 30 days.
  4. Professional services engagements billing at original rates after scope reduction. Law firms, design firms, recruiting retainers. $5K to $20K. 30 to 60 days.

Category 6: Revenue leakage (items 26 to 29)

  1. Usage-based pricing undercounting usage. Sample 20 invoices against actual product data. $3K to $15K one-time back-bill plus ongoing. 30 to 60 days.
  2. Overage charges in contracts never applied. Storage overages, API call overages, seat overages. $2K to $12K one-time. 30 days.
  3. Professional services hours over scope, never billed. $5K to $20K. 30 days.
  4. Contract uplifts (typically annual 3 to 7%) not triggered on renewal. $2K to $10K/year. 30 days.

Category 7: Headcount and contractors (items 30 to 33)

  1. Long-tenured contractors who should be W-2 employees (or W-2 employees who should be 1099 contractors). Legal exposure plus benefits or tax arbitrage. $5K to $25K/year savings or exposure reduction. 60 to 90 days.
  2. State payroll tax registrations not matching employee residence. Over-registration or under-registration. $2K to $15K. 30 to 60 days.
  3. Benefits plan over-specified for headcount tier. $3K to $12K/year. 60 days.
  4. Severance, PTO accrual, or equity-vesting obligations mis-tracked on the balance sheet. Not cash recovery directly; balance-sheet hygiene that affects a raise. Variable. 30 days.

Category 8: G&A overhead (items 34 to 37)

  1. Legal retainers not being used. $1K to $5K/month. 30 days.
  2. Insurance policies over-specified for current exposure (D&O, E&O, cyber). Rebroker. $3K to $15K/year. 60 to 90 days.
  3. Office lease on square footage not being used. Sublet or renegotiate. $1K to $10K/month. 60 to 180 days.
  4. Equipment, IT assets, or office supplies on auto-replenishment past current need. $500 to $3K/month. 14 days.

If 6 or more items checked on your walk, the 30-minute call is the next move. No deck, no pitch. We read the pattern and map the recovery.

Book a call: calendly.com/russell-decisive/30min

Every diagnostic engagement carries a 3x recovery guarantee. If we do not identify at least 3x our diagnostic fee in recoverable cash in the first 30 days, the diagnostic fee is refunded. In 4 years of engagements, we have not refunded one.

Design notes for PDF

  • 1 page front and back at 10pt, or 2 pages at 11pt.
  • Decisive Finance header mark on page 1, wordmark on page 2.
  • Categories numbered with bold category name + tagline.
  • Each item has: number, title in bold, description in regular, dollar range in monospace, time in italic.
  • Printable checkbox (empty square) to the left of each item.
  • Footer with Calendly URL on every page, QR code optional.

Distribution plan at launch

  • Homepage: secondary CTA below the hero (“Run the checklist yourself. Download free.”).
  • Pillar 3 hub: primary CTA at close.
  • Every Pillar 3 spoke post: CTA variant = recovery-checklist.
  • Pillar 1 results tier 2 and 3: embedded link on the results screen.
  • LinkedIn Thursday field note, weeks 2 and 5: link in bio + mentioned on post.
  • Friday email weeks 2 and 5: primary link.