The value model

Most of the Return Isn’t the People You Keep.

Retention is the number everyone models because it’s the easy one. It is also the smallest line in this model. The larger return is the time your organisation currently spends being confused — work that gets done twice, decisions nobody chases, careers that stall because the next move was never visible, and budget you already committed that nobody spends.

This model prices all of it, separates what we can evidence from what we can only estimate, and lets you turn any line off. If it doesn’t clear your bar on the hard tier alone, don’t buy it.

Tier 1 · Cash avoided

Spend that leaves the business today and stops. Auditable against your own finance data. Anchored to published research on turnover and internal versus external hiring.

Tier 2 · Capacity recovered

Hours currently lost to coordination and navigation, priced at your own loaded cost. Grounded in published time-use research, but the recovery rate is our assumption — and yours to set.

Tier 3 · Performance unlocked

What recovered capacity produces when it’s deployed, plus development uplift. We have no outcome data for this yet. It is modelled, labelled as modelled, and it is what your pilot measures.

Your Organisation

Nothing is saved or sent
Shape of the workforce
Effect assumptions — change these
What it costs

Enterprise pricing is custom, with volume discounts by size. Below the $25 individual price, because every seat is committed. Deployed org-wide — every employee and every manager, not a cohort. Talk to us for a quote.

Modelled Annual Return

Annual value
across active levers
Year-one net
after platform + implementation
Return
per $1 of annual platform spend — why this is large
Payback
to recover year-one cost
Year-one cost
Tier 1 — cash avoided
Tier 2 — capacity recovered
Tier 3 — performance unlocked
hours a year currently lost to coordination and career friction
full-time-equivalent capacity released for new work — without hiring
platform cost per person per year

Where the Number Comes From

Switch any line off
LeverTierEvidenceAnnual
See What the Pilot Measures

Why the Ratio Looks Too Good, and Why We’re Leaving It That Way

Per-seat software costs roughly a hundred dollars per person per year. A single regrettable departure costs most of a salary. Any honest model that puts those two numbers in a ratio produces a large multiple — that is arithmetic, not marketing, and it is true of every retention intervention ever costed. We have not manufactured a more modest-looking number by inflating our price or discounting our own model.

So don’t lead with the ratio. Lead with payback in months and with the question underneath it: do you believe the reduction assumption? Everything hinges on that one slider, which is why it is the first one you can move and why we default it to 5% — well below what the internal-mobility literature associates with visible career paths.

Read this before you send it to finance. Tier 1 is the only tier we would defend in a business case today. Tier 2 is grounded in published time-use research but the recovery rate is an estimate. Tier 3 has no outcome data behind it — ours or anyone’s — because the category is too young to have any. We would rather you present the CFO view and be right than present the full model and be challenged on it. The full model is a hypothesis with a measurement plan attached.
The anti-stacking rules

Four Things This Model Deliberately Refuses to Do.

It Never Counts an Hour Twice

Recovered hours are valued once, at your loaded cost, and only the share you say gets redeployed. Tier 3 adds only the surplus above cost — which is zero unless you set a return above 1.0×. Most value models quietly count the same hour as a saving and again as output.

It Counts the Hiring Premium for One Year

External hires are paid meaningfully more than internal promotions into the same role, and that gap persists. We count it once. Annualising it over a tenure would roughly triple the line and it would deserve every bit of the scepticism it got.

It Calls Redirected Budget What It Is

Getting your unused education budget actually used is not a cash saving. It’s committed spend converted from waste into development. It shows in the model as value, and it is labelled so nobody presents it to a CFO as money back.

It Doesn’t Price the Thing We Sell Hardest

The insight layer — where development stalls, which population is at risk, whether a programme moved anything — carries no dollar line here. It changes what you decide to fund, and we can’t honestly put a number on a better decision. It stays out.

The floor

If Only One Line Is True, Is It Still Worth It?

At the defaults above — 2,500 people, 14% attrition, 60% regrettable, and an 8% reduction in regrettable attrition, which is a fraction of what the retention literature attributes to visible internal paths — Tier 1 alone covers the platform several times over. Every other line in this model is upside on top of a case that already closes.

That’s the test worth applying to us, and to everyone else you’re looking at.