Think for a moment about the ballast of a Great Lakes freighter. It is a massive, unseen weight, composed of nothing but heavy water and leaden intent, sitting far below the waterline where no one ever sees it.
If you were a naval architect obsessed only with speed and light-footedness, you might look at that ballast as a “cost center.” It adds weight. It requires pumps. It slows the ship down. It takes up space that could be used for more grain or more iron ore. You could “optimize” the ship by pumping that ballast out, and for a few miles in calm water, you would look like a genius.
Your fuel efficiency would climb by 11% and your speed would increase by . But the moment the gale comes-the moment the waves hit ten feet-the ship loses its center of gravity. Without the weight that looks like a burden, the entire vessel capsizes.
Fast, light, and efficient-until the first sign of turbulent weather.
Heavy and deliberate, but fundamentally unshakeable during a crisis.
The Perfect Crust and the Hidden Rot
I had a bite of sourdough bread this morning that reminded me of this exact phenomenon, though in a much more visceral, nauseating way. On the surface, the loaf was perfect. It had a golden, floured crust and the scent of yeast.
But one bite in, I tasted something sharp and chemical. I turned the loaf over and pulled back a fold of the crust to find a blooming patch of grey-green mold. It was a failure of the internal environment, a rot that had started long before the surface showed a single blemish.
In business, we do this to ourselves constantly. We look at the “crust”-the revenue, the marketing, the flashy sales figures-and we assume the interior is healthy. Then, we look at the support team, the people who actually keep the internal environment stable, and we label them a cost. We treat them like the mold I should have seen coming, rather than the preservative that prevents the rot.
Confessions of a “Support Tax” Believer
I have been notoriously wrong about this in the past. , I was a staunch believer in the cult of “Product-Led Growth.” I argued in boardrooms that if a product is truly great-if the engineering is airtight and the user interface is intuitive-you shouldn’t need a robust support team.
I viewed support as a janitorial function. To me, every support ticket was a failure of the product team, and every dollar spent on a support agent was a “support tax” we were paying for our own incompetence. I thought that by starving the support department, I would force the engineers to build things that didn’t break.
I was arrogant, and I was dangerously mistaken. I was looking at the ledger and seeing a line of expense with no corresponding revenue, and I failed to see the invisible thread connecting a solved problem to a three-year contract renewal.
A customer with a solved problem is 14% more likely to become a brand advocate than one who never had a problem at all.
The Sunday at 3:00 AM Crisis
This misunderstanding is particularly lethal in high-stakes industries like HVAC. When a homeowner’s heating system fails in the middle of a freeze in Minnesota, they aren’t looking for a “disruptive user experience.” They are looking for heat.
They are in a state of high-cortisol panic. If the company they bought from treats support as a “cost center” to be minimized, that customer is routed to a labyrinthine automated phone tree or a chatbot that can’t tell a heat pump from a hole in the ground.
When you cut the support budget by 22% to make the quarterly numbers look pretty, you aren’t just saving on payroll. You are actively dismantling the only bridge you have back to that customer’s wallet.
In the world of climate control, the product is just the beginning of the relationship. A high-quality cooper hunter tech support representative isn’t an expense; they are the person who ensures the brand’s promise isn’t buried under six inches of snow when a sensor goes haywire at on a Sunday.
The Price of the Grease vs. The Cost of Friction
A spreadsheet is a dangerous tool because it lacks a memory. It sees the $18.50 per hour paid to a technician, but it doesn’t see the $4,200 lifetime value of the customer who stayed loyal because that technician stayed on the phone for to walk an installer through a complex wiring issue.
The spreadsheet sees the grease, but ignores the catastrophic friction of losing a customer.
The spreadsheet sees the cost of the grease, but it ignores the friction of the machine.
“The most expensive part of a high-end mechanical watch isn’t the gold casing or the sapphire glass. It’s the ‘dead’ time spent testing the tension of the springs… If you rush the assembly, the watch might keep perfect time for three weeks, but the moment the atmospheric pressure changes, it will begin to lose minutes.”
– Ivan P., Watch Movement Assembler
In Ivan’s world, the “support” is the calibration-the invisible work that ensures the product survives its own environment.
Cutting the Immune System
When an executive sits in a glass-walled conference room and marks the support department for a reduction, they are essentially saying that the future doesn’t matter as much as the next . They are looking at a line of humans who take complaints and see them as a “burden” on the bottom line.
But what they are actually cutting is the company’s immune system. The “cost center” label is a linguistic trap. Once you label something a cost, the only logical action is to minimize it. You don’t minimize a “revenue generator.” You don’t minimize an “asset.”
But by calling support a cost, you give yourself permission to ignore the humanity of the people doing the work and the desperation of the people receiving the help.
I’ve watched companies replace seasoned, expert support staff with low-cost, outsourced teams who have never seen the physical product they are supposed to be supporting. They might save $114,000 a year in overhead.
But then they wonder why their churn rate climbed from 4.1% to 9.7%. They wonder why their “Net Promoter Score” is in the basement. They blame the marketing team. They blame the economy. They never look back at the spreadsheet where they deleted the very people who were holding the customers’ hands.
Cutting Off Your Own Ears
The reality is that support is the only department that has its finger on the pulse of the market’s actual frustrations. Sales tells you what people think they want. Support tells you what is actually going wrong. When you silence that department, you aren’t just cutting costs; you are cutting off your own ears.
It is like the mold on my bread. The mold isn’t the problem; the mold is the sign that the environment was compromised. When you have a high volume of support tickets, the “cost” isn’t the support team-the cost is the product defect or the confusing manual that caused the tickets in the first place.
The spreadsheet is a filter that catches the cost of the grease but lets the friction go unmeasured.
But by punishing the support team for the volume of work, you are effectively blaming the doctor for the number of sick people in the waiting room.
The Cost of Loyalty
We need to stop viewing the post-sale experience as a “liability” to be managed. In an era where every product is essentially a commodity-where you can buy a mini-split or a refrigerator or a software subscription from a hundred different vendors-the only true differentiator is the quality of the “invisible” work.
It’s the ballast. It’s the grease in the watch. It’s the knowledge that if something goes wrong, there is a human being on the other end of the line who actually knows how the machine works.
When I bit into that moldy bread, I didn’t just throw away the slice; I threw away the whole loaf and I’ll never buy from that bakery again. I didn’t care that the crust looked perfect. I didn’t care that the price was reasonable. The internal failure destroyed the external value.
The next time you see a support team listed as a “cost center” on a budget review, remember the freighter. Remember that the weight you think is slowing you down is the only thing keeping you upright when the weather turns.
If you treat your support team like an expendable expense, don’t be surprised when your customers treat your brand like an expendable commodity. The cost of loyalty is high, but the cost of losing it is infinite. We have to stop measuring the value of a team by how little they cost us, and start measuring it by how much they save us from ourselves.