My business partner and I started our company seventeen years ago with $50 and an idea. No outside funding. No runway. Just a product we built ourselves, a hosting environment we set up ourselves, and a commitment to not spend money we did not have.
That constraint turned out to be the most useful discipline I ever developed. When you cannot raise a round to cover bad decisions, you learn fast what actually matters.
Today that company processes hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions for thousands of customers. The habits that made it work, questioning every expense, measuring outcomes, and building lean operations that perform at scale, did not stop being useful when I joined public boards. If anything, they became more important.
The discipline of spending someone else’s money carefully starts with treating it exactly like your own.
1. “We Have Always Done It That Way” Is Not a Budget Strategy
When I was appointed to the Griffin-Spalding Business Tourism Association, the local DMO responsible for spending hotel-motel tax revenue under Georgia state law, one of my first moves was a line-by-line review of the existing technology and vendor contracts.
What I found was predictable to anyone who has audited an organization that has not been seriously managed in years. Contracts had not been renegotiated. Services had not been evaluated against current alternatives. Vendors were collecting monthly fees for work that was either no longer needed or could be done better at a fraction of the cost.
I identified over $40,000 in annual savings by cutting unnecessary contracts and migrating to a modern, managed hosting environment. Some of those contracts had been in place for years because the previous vendors were connected to a prior board member. The board had inherited them and never questioned them.
That is a common pattern in public organizations. It is also unacceptable when the money comes from public tax revenue.
2. Public Boards Should Audit Technology Spending Like a Startup Would
A self-funded startup reviews every vendor relationship against one question: does this produce enough value to justify the cost? If the answer is no, the contract ends.
Public boards rarely apply that discipline because no one personally loses money when the board wastes it. That is exactly why it has to be a structural habit, not a personal one.
A useful technology audit for any public board should ask:
- What does each vendor or contract actually deliver each month?
- When was the contract last competitively reviewed?
- Is the pricing consistent with current market rates for comparable services?
- Are any services duplicated across multiple vendors?
- Is the board paying for capacity or capabilities it does not use?
Georgia’s procurement guidance for public entities supports competitive evaluation of vendor relationships [1]. The board does not need to be hostile to existing vendors. It needs to be honest about whether each contract still earns its cost.
3. Lean IT Operations Are Not About Cutting Corners
There is a difference between cheap and lean. Cheap means buying the lowest-priced option regardless of quality or risk. Lean means eliminating waste while maintaining or improving performance.
For public board IT operations, lean usually looks like this:
- Managed hosting over custom server administration. A modern managed hosting environment costs less, performs better, and requires less staff time than aging infrastructure maintained under a legacy contract.
- Software-as-a-service for standard functions. Email, document storage, meeting management, and public records tools all have modern cloud options that are less expensive and more maintainable than legacy installations.
- Performance-first website design. A government or DMO website that loads in under two seconds on a mobile device costs almost nothing extra to build but significantly improves public access. Slow websites lose visitors and reduce the value of every marketing dollar spent driving traffic to them.
- Annual contract reviews as standard board practice. Not every three years when someone finally complains. Every year, as a line item on the board calendar.
4. Speed and Cost Are Not in Conflict
One of the persistent myths in public sector IT is that better performance requires more spending. In my experience, the opposite is usually true.
The GSBTA hosting migration that produced $40,000 in annual savings also improved site performance, added proper SSL certificate management, improved uptime, and reduced the staff time required to manage the environment. We spent less and got more.
That outcome is available to most small public boards that are willing to do the audit work. The barrier is rarely technical. It is usually political: existing vendors have relationships, inertia is comfortable, and no one wants to be the person who tells a longtime contractor that their contract is ending.
Protecting a vendor relationship at the expense of public money is not loyalty. It is a failure of fiduciary duty.
5. What Startup Discipline Looks Like in a Board Room
Running a self-funded company for seventeen years means I have made every budget mistake personally. When a vendor was not delivering, I felt it. When a hosting decision was wrong, I fixed it myself at 2 a.m. That experience creates a very direct relationship between decision quality and outcomes.
Public boards do not have that direct feedback loop. A bad vendor contract just quietly drains resources. No one calls at 2 a.m. That is why the discipline has to be intentional.
Practically, startup discipline at a board table looks like:
- asking for itemized invoices and reviewing them,
- requiring vendors to justify renewal rather than assuming continuation,
- benchmarking costs against publicly available market rates,
- and treating “that is how we have always done it” as a reason to look harder, not a reason to stop asking.
The public organizations that manage technology well are almost always the ones with at least one board member or staff leader who has had personal skin in the game of running an efficient operation. That experience is worth bringing to the table and using.
6. The Broader Point About Board Governance
Technology spending is one example. The same discipline applies to any operational area where a public board has oversight responsibility.
The goal is not to run government like a startup. Public accountability, procurement law, and open-records requirements all create constraints that private companies do not face [1]. Those constraints are legitimate and important.
The goal is to bring the same seriousness about outcomes, costs, and results to public decision-making that a founder who built something from nothing brings to every line of the P&L. That mindset does not require a startup background. It requires deciding that the public money in your stewardship deserves the same scrutiny you would give your own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Self-funded startups build habits around justifying every expense, measuring outcomes, and cutting anything that does not produce results. Those habits are directly applicable to how a public board should review technology contracts and operational spending.
Yes. Many boards inherit outdated contracts with vendors who charge high monthly fees for low-value work. A structured review often identifies consolidation and renegotiation opportunities that reduce costs without reducing capability.
Continuing legacy contracts because that is how it has always been done, without reviewing whether the work is still needed or whether better options exist at lower cost.
References
- Georgia Municipal Association. (2023). Digital Infrastructure Procurement Guidelines for Local Officials. Georgia Municipal Association. https://www.gmanet.com/
