Why “Smart” Business Decisions Feel So Bad: The Hidden Cost of Revenue-First Thinking

This week in my Equity-Centered Coaching Certification, we were guided to recognize phrases like “it’s just not sitting right with me” or “it really bothers me” as immediate cues that someone is naming a values misalignment they haven’t yet found the words for.

It resonated deeply with me and with my own experience of misalignment within “business as usual.” So much of business language is really just shorthand for what we’ve been taught to believe is good, smart, or efficient.

And so many of those phrases—the ones we repeat without question—have become the default scripts we use to justify harm.

“Best practices.”
“Standard operating procedure.”
“Just good business sense.”

They carry entire worldviews tucked inside them. Worldviews we may not even realize we’re perpetuating. And in my experience, they have left me with knots in my stomach, sleepless nights, and a deep sense of moral injury.

And to be clear, this isn’t about calling anyone out. If you’ve used those phrases, this isn’t a condemnation. So have I. I recently caught myself using one while explaining a hiring plan, referring to engineers as “revenue-generating” because they were building the products we’d later sell. They weren’t “revenue-generating” in the traditional sense, but their work quite literally made revenue possible. That’s what made me pause.

I share this not from a place of judgment, but from curiosity. And from the freedom, agency, and responsibility I have now, as someone running my own company and helping others design theirs, to question what I once took for granted. This isn’t a critique of individuals; it’s a critique of systems and how easily we reinforce them when we’re not paying attention.

It’s why I started the series Rethinking Best Practices back in August: to examine the phrases we inherit as unquestioned truth and ask whether they actually align with our values, or merely with the systems that trained us.

Today, I’m devoting space to two:

The Myth of the “Revenue-Generating Role.”
And the Harm of the “Commodity Hire.”

They’re two sides of the same coin. They define whose work is seen, whose isn’t, and what we believe is worth protecting when things get hard.

And, in my opinion, both represent the wrong worldview.

Every role is revenue-generating.
No human is a commodity.
The inability to see how doesn’t make it untrue.

This isn’t a new idea. Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and so many others taught us that economies built on dehumanization can’t produce liberation. I’m simply applying that truth to how we run our businesses.

Before I can break these two down—and the worldview they represent—I want to summarize how they’re typically understood and wielded in the workplace today.

A Revenue-Generating Role:

In most corporate settings, a revenue-generating role is shorthand for a position whose work can be traced directly to the creation of income, typically through sales, marketing, or product output. According to Salesforce, revenue generation is “the combination of processes, technology, and strategies that help a business earn and grow revenue in a sustainable way.”

But here’s my position: what’s often described as “non-revenue-generating” isn’t actually disconnected from revenue—it’s just harder to quantify. That doesn’t make it unquantifiable.

Operations, people, finance, and admin all hold structural and relational functions that make revenue possible. When businesses draw a hard line between revenue-generating and non-revenue-generating, they’re not naming a financial truth. They’re naming an understanding problem.

If you don’t understand how the people in your business are essential, then you don’t understand your business. 

A Commodity Hire: 

A commodity hire describes the belief (explicit or implied) that a worker is interchangeable. It’s a worldview, not a job description.

In economic terms, a commodity is defined as something “interchangeable with other goods of the same type and lacking differentiating characteristics.” When that logic seeps into hiring and management, people are treated like identical inputs on a balance sheet: easily replaced, endlessly substitutable.

In practice, labeling someone (or even thinking of someone) as a commodity hire reduces their distinct contribution into cost efficiency. It’s the logic of extraction, not stewardship: a holdover from industrial and colonial labor systems that prized productivity over personhood.

The Origin of This Worldview

We inherited this language from the same industrial systems that built assembly lines and balance sheets around extraction. Value was linear: materials in, product out, profit up. Everything that didn’t touch the conveyor belt was considered overhead: the administrative drag on “real work.” These hierarchies didn’t just value profit over people; they were racialized and gendered systems that codified who counted as a person in the first place.

This worldview was born on plantations and in colonies, where wealth was built through the extraction of enslaved and indentured labor under the banner of “efficiency.” The factory floor evolved from plantation fields and colonized lands where people themselves were treated as inputs in the profit equation. The industrial age didn’t invent extraction; it mechanized it, scaling the same logic that once turned stolen people and stolen land into capital.

That logic still drives most modern organizations. We still separate “makers” from “managers,” “closers” from “support.” We still equate worth with proximity to the sale.

And when layoffs come, and they always do, we start with “non-revenue-generating.” We may even use that phrase when letting someone go, as though naming it softens the blow. It doesn’t. It only magnifies the truth: their value to the organization has been reduced to revenue.

Those so-called “non-revenue” roles are often Operations, People, Culture, and Admin.

The ones who know where everything actually lives and how it all holds together. Gone first.

When you cut those roles, you cut the organization’s ability to metabolize its own growth.

Operations is how you translate vision into repeatable outcomes.
Finance is how you make informed bets instead of emotional ones.
People ops is how you retain talent long enough for strategy to work.
Admin is how you give everyone else time to think, focus, and create.
Trust is how you move faster.

These aren’t nice-to-haves. They are revenue systems. And, lest we forget,  administrative, care, and operational labor have long been feminized, racialized, and dismissed as “support” rather than seen as the infrastructure of value itself.

If a business is a body, revenue is its oxygen. But operations, people, and culture are the lungs that make breathing possible. You can hold your breath for a minute, maybe two. But eventually, deprivation becomes suffocation.

When you label someone “non-revenue-generating,” what you’re really saying is, I don’t understand the ecosystem I built.

Because in a healthy system, revenue is a collective outcome, not an individual metric.

The salesperson closes the deal, yes—but only because someone designed the product, someone built the process, someone handled the invoicing, someone managed the client’s trust, and someone kept the lights on long enough for the team to keep doing it.

Revenue isn’t generated.
It’s cultivated.

This isn’t a moral argument—it’s a systems one.

Capitalism conditions us to see the world in cost centers and profit centers. But regenerative business design sees circulation.

Every function in your company either creates value directly or protects the conditions that make value creation possible.

HR doesn’t “generate” revenue? Tell that to the founder trying to replace three burned-out team members whose departure cost six months of productivity.

Finance doesn’t “generate” revenue? Ask the CFO who keeps the company solvent long enough for marketing’s big win to matter.

Admin doesn’t “generate” revenue? Wait until you spend a week trying to find the one password only they remembered.

The point isn’t that everyone is equal in scope or pay. It’s that everyone participates in the same economic ecosystem.

If you can’t trace how a role contributes to revenue, that’s a failure of design clarity, not proof of irrelevance.

The emotional toll of misunderstanding value

For employees, being labeled “non-revenue-generating” is a form of erasure. It tells them their contribution is invisible until something breaks. It breeds insecurity, resentment, and detachment (the very precursors to disengagement that leaders then misdiagnose as lack of initiative).

When those same employees finally leave (or are laid off), leadership marvels at how much institutional knowledge walked out the door with them. “We didn’t realize how much they handled,” they say, genuinely shocked.

The truth is they never looked.

They never built the dashboards, the feedback loops, or the decision structures to understand how value circulates across the system. They just assumed it was linear.

Reframing the question

What if, instead of asking Is this a revenue-generating role? you asked:

How does this role contribute to value creation, stability, or scalability?

Those are the three levers of sustainable growth.

• Value creation: Marketing, product, sales, partnerships.

• Value stability: Operations, finance, systems, people ops.

• Value scalability: Leadership, culture, and trust.

Cut any one category, and the others destabilize in slow motion.

The leadership responsibility

It’s easy to blame the economy. Harder to admit that we built teams without defining the through-lines between contribution and revenue.

If you’re hiring, this is where the work begins. Every role should come with a clear statement of value connection: how it supports or sustains the conditions for revenue to exist.

And if you’re leading a company that’s restructuring, before you start slashing budgets, get curious.

Ask yourself:

• What measurable outcomes does this role influence?

• How would our pace, profit, or quality change if it disappeared?

• Where is revenue dependent on this person’s unseen labor?

If you can’t answer, you’re not ready to cut.

A healthier framework

When you plan your next org chart or budget cycle, replace the binary of revenue-generating vs. non-revenue-generating with something truer:

• Direct Revenue Roles – Drive immediate sales or conversions.

• Indirect Revenue Roles – Create systems, culture, and clarity that enable revenue to repeat.

• Revenue Protection Roles – Safeguard compliance, trust, and continuity.

Then build your KPIs accordingly. Not everyone will have a sales quota, but everyone should have a measurable link to value creation.

That’s what real alignment looks like.

The reframe

What if we stopped treating revenue like a finish line and started treating it like a feedback signal?

Revenue is a beautiful signal, telling you how well your entire ecosystem is functioning. It’s the cumulative reflection of how your people, systems, and strategy hold together under pressure.

Cut the wrong parts, and the system bleeds out slowly.
Invest in understanding it, and it becomes self-sustaining.

A Necessary Nuance

It’s worth naming: not every role in every organization is essential or even ethical.

In large corporations, there’s often bloat, bureaucracy, and entire functions designed to protect power rather than serve people. Some roles exist purely to obscure accountability or uphold systems of harm. That’s not what I’m talking about here.

This conversation isn’t a defense of inefficiency or corporate opacity.
It’s about alignment.
And it’s why I focus my work on small businesses and founders, because in those spaces, structure itself becomes activism.

A small business has the unique ability to design differently: to make every role intentional, integrated, and connected to the company’s purpose and values. That’s the work that excites me.

So yes, when the economy tightens or revenue drops, tough decisions have to be made. Roles evolve. Teams contract. That’s part of responsible stewardship.

But those decisions can still be made with integrity and with clarity about why the role is ending and care for the human in that transition.

And on the flip side, I see early-stage founders overcorrect in the other direction: rushing to hire marketing or sales first, believing that’s the fastest path to revenue. It might be a direct path but not always a strategic one.

Because without the right operational, financial, and strategic scaffolding, those sales and marketing efforts become disconnected from the deeper ecosystem of the business itself.

Revenue without integration might feel like acceleration… but it isn’t sustainable.

The invitation

If you’re deep in planning season, open your spreadsheets and change the column header.

Delete non-revenue-generating.

Replace it with indirect-revenue-sustaining.

Then look at your people not as line items, but as levers.

Ask what value each person generates, protects, or amplifies, and how you can make that visible. And then meet with them and make sure they know that you know their value. And invite them into ownership of the domain they steward of your entire business ecosystem’s health.

Because businesses don’t grow by trimming what’s invisible. They grow by understanding what’s essential.

And the myth of the “revenue-generating role” and the “commodity hire”?

That’s just another way of saying you haven’t learned to see the whole system yet.

xo,
Brittany

P.S. As a white leader in systems built by extraction, I see this reframing not as intellectual exercise but as practice: realigning my own definitions of value so they no longer depend on inherited hierarchies.