Decision · 3 Oct 2026
The Fix Gap
Why the automation that reports success can still miss most of its work. 74% of data professionals say the business finds data issues first.
Gartner · HBR · MIT SMR · Monte Carlo / Wakefield
These are free. No signup, no email capture, no gate. Every figure is attributed to a named source, and where a widely repeated statistic could not be traced I have said so inside the brief rather than quietly using it anyway.
Decision · 3 Oct 2026
The Status Gap
Why finished work still says In progress. 62% of workers surveyed say they struggle with too much time spent searching for information.
Microsoft · McKinsey · Atlassian · PMI · MIS Quarterly
Decision · 3 Oct 2026
The Drift Gap
Why every re-check of a competitor price sheet finds new prices. At large US chains the same product carried an identical price at two locations only 78% of the time.
NBER (Cavallo, 2018) · American Economic Review (Cavallo, 2017)
Decision · 3 Oct 2026
The Deadline Gap
Why the oldest backlog is the wrong work the day before a pay run. One in five US payrolls contains errors, and 78% of workers surveyed would struggle if pay were a week late.
EY for Paycom · PayrollOrg · US Department of Labor
Decision · 3 Oct 2026
The Rule Gap
Why a reasonable expense rule and a reasonable operator still end up with two rulebooks. Nearly half of business travellers say they bend or break expense policy.
GBTA Foundation · SAP Concur · ACFE · IRS
Decision · 3 Oct 2026
The Evidence Gap
Why the obviously wrong entry on a time record can be the only proof someone worked. US rules require hours to be recorded accurately, and 1 in 5 US payrolls contains errors.
US Department of Labor · Ernst and Young
Decision · 3 Oct 2026
The Inbox Gap
Why copying your manager on every send buries the one reply that needs them. The average worker already receives 117 emails a day, most skimmed in under a minute.
Microsoft · McKinsey Global Institute · Radicati · UC Irvine
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Operations Gap
Why 95 percent of enterprise AI investment produced no measurable return, what the 5 percent did instead, and why AI does not fix a broken process, it runs it faster.
MIT NANDA · Goldman Sachs · HBR · Zylo
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Delegation Gap
Why your last hire made you busier before they made you lighter. Gallup found delegation is the highest-leverage founder skill and the one three quarters of founders lack.
Gallup · HBR · SHRM · Brandon Hall Group
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Key-Person Gap
What it costs to be the business rather than to run it. Owner-independent firms earn more today, not just at exit, and the median listed business never finds a buyer.
Gallup · BizBuySell · Shannon Pratt · PwC
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Margin Gap
Why the busiest month was not the most profitable one. Utilization and realization multiply, and the most profitable owners bill less of their own time, not more.
Service Performance Insight · The Wow Company
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Cash Timing Gap
Why a profitable month can still miss payroll. The median small business holds 27 days of cash and waits about 38 days to be paid.
JPMorgan Chase Institute · Xero · Federal Reserve
Diagnostic · 13 Aug 2026
The Operations Audit
Twenty questions, scored out of forty, measuring whether your business runs on systems or on people. Printable, and useful whether or not we ever speak.
Documentation · Ownership · Measurement · Key-person
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Switching Gap
Your team is not slow. They toggle between applications roughly 1,200 times a day and lose about four hours a week simply re-orienting, which is five working weeks a year each.
Harvard Business Review · Soroco · Qatalog and Cornell
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Shadow AI Gap
Forty percent of companies bought an AI subscription. Over ninety percent have staff already using their own. And the unapproved tool often returns more than the official programme.
MIT Project NANDA · IBM with Ponemon · Microsoft
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Payback Gap
Half the automation budget goes where a demo photographs well. The measurable return was in the back office, and it came from cutting external spend rather than headcount.
MIT Project NANDA · Gartner · Ernst and Young
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Access Gap
The laptop came back, the accounts did not. Small businesses face a harder ransomware profile than large ones, and the most quoted statistic on this was disavowed by its own publisher.
Verizon DBIR · Hiscox · National Cyber Security Alliance
Research · 13 Aug 2026
The Licence Gap
You cut the number of tools and the bill still went up. Roughly half the seats you pay for are never really opened, and nobody owns the renewal date.
Zylo · BetterCloud · all vendor-published, and labelled as such
A note on the numbers
Several of these briefs contain a section explaining a statistic I chose not to use. The claim that owner dependency costs 20 to 50 percent of business value, the claim that 82 percent of small businesses fail because of cash flow, and the claim that 60 percent of small businesses close within six months of a cyberattack are all repeated constantly. The last of those was publicly disavowed in 2022 by the organisation credited with it. A brief that quotes a number it cannot source is a brief you should not act on.