The Number Is Real. The Direction Is Wrong.
Corrigan spends two days a month checking what got billed against what the contracts say.
Last year that turned up three hundred and ten thousand dollars the company had failed to invoice. Real money. Recovered, banked, in the accounts.
It went on the slide where the cost of doing nothing goes, and the CFO read it once and funded nothing.
She was right to.
A Receipt Is Not an Invoice
An invoice is money leaving. A receipt is money that stayed.
Corrigan's three hundred and ten thousand is a receipt. The company did not lose it. Two days a month of somebody's attention went in and the money came back out, which means the current arrangement worked exactly as everyone hoped.
Put that in the cost-of-inaction slot and read what it says out loud. Nothing was lost. On this evidence, waiting has cost us nothing at all.
That is not a weak argument for change. It is a strong argument against it, made by you, on your own slide, in a number you chose.
Three Ways It Goes Wrong
The first is what happened to Corrigan. A number the workaround produced. The catch, the recovery, the error found in time. It reads as proof the problem is expensive and it is proof the process is working. The tell is that it has a hero in it. Somebody caught something.
The second is quieter. A saving your fix cannot cause. Moving off the old data center does not end the lease, and the lease runs three more years whatever anyone decides. The number is real, the fix does not touch it, and the first person in the room who has read the lease says so. The tell is that whoever would have to stop the spending is not in the meeting.
The third gets furthest before anyone catches it. A benefit with no mechanism, in a currency nobody budgets. Occupancy up two points after the network upgrade. Maybe. Name the chain that connects them in one sentence, and find the budget line that occupancy points come out of. If neither exists, that is a hope with a decimal on it. The tell is the unit. If it is not money, nobody can spend it.
The Test Takes Four Seconds
Fund the ask. Now look at the number again.
If it is still there, it was never the cost of doing nothing.
Corrigan's three hundred and ten thousand survives the fix, because a working billing system would have invoiced correctly and there would have been nothing to find. The lease survives the fix. The occupancy claim survives the fix, because it was never a cost in the first place.
Run it before the deck leaves your desk. It is the only check that catches all three, and every one of them reads fine on the page.
What to Use Instead
The cost of waiting hides in three places and none of them is a catch.
Labor already spent. Not what it saved. What it costs to keep spending it, this year, whether or not anything goes wrong.
Risk already carried. Not the near miss. The exposure that is sitting there between now and the fix, priced honestly, including the times nobody was looking.
Opportunity already forfeited. The thing that has not been started because the people who would start it are doing this instead.
Corrigan's real number was never the recovery.
It is that the recovery has a single point of failure and his name is on it. Two days a month, four years, one person in finance who can read a contract. He takes three weeks in August, and in August nothing gets found.
That one passes. It is risk the company is carrying right now, it is priceable, and it disappears the moment the ask is funded.
Nobody put it on a slide, because nobody ever billed for it.
-BZ
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