Everything we use, free. If you can fix it yourself, fix it yourself.

Carlota Perez’s account of how a technological revolution actually unfolds has two halves.¹ First comes installation: money pours in, everybody buys, the claims get enormous, and remarkably little changes in how work is done. Then, later, comes deployment, where organisations reorganise around what they already bought, and that is where the productivity turns up.

The gap between the two is not a technology gap. The factories in 1900 already owned the electric motors.² What took forty years was moving the machines.

That is the whole argument of this series, restated. For a business of the size we work with, the turning point is not a better model arriving. It is somebody deciding which of six places a number should live in, and switching the other five off.

You are not waiting for the technology. It arrived. You are waiting for a decision about the floor plan, and that one is yours.

The kit

Everything below is on this site already, free, with no form and no email address to hand over. If you can run these yourself, run them yourself. That is not a marketing position, it is the honest description of what most businesses at this stage actually need.

1. The handoff count. Pick one figure. List every place it lives. The pairs to keep in step are n times n minus one, over two. Six places is fifteen. That number is your real problem. Paper 1.
2. The spreadsheet tax. People who touch the numbers, times minutes a day, times twenty-two, times a fully loaded hourly cost. Write the yearly figure next to the quote you have been putting off. Paper 1.
3. Cost per outcome. Messages in the sequence, times the list, times the rate, divided by the number of people who actually did the thing. Then ask whether one of those is worth that to you. Paper 3.
4. The threshold check. Aggregate turnover, every financial year since 2017-18, on one page, from your accountant. The e-invoicing rule looks backwards, not forwards. Paper 4.
5. Automate or hire. Monthly saving is the fraction of the role it really takes, times the fully loaded monthly cost, minus what it costs to run. Payback is the build cost divided by that. Past about twelve months, hire the person. Paper 7.
6. The eight questions before anybody quotes you anything - and the thirty-day measurement protocol for afterwards, so the result you report is one you could defend. Papers 8 and 13.

The number this paper was supposed to end on

The plan for this series ended here with an aggregate: the median annual cost of doing nothing, across every business studied. It would have made a good final line.

There is no such number. The two-panel study these fifteen papers were designed around - owners on one side, their customers on the other, the same questions to both - has not been fielded. Not one respondent.

We could have produced the figure anyway. Nobody would have checked, and it would have been the most quoted line in the series. It would also have made every other number in these fourteen papers worthless, because a reader who finds one invented figure is right to assume the rest.

So the last card on this page says not measured, which is the rule the whole series was written under and the only ending consistent with it.

What to do now

Take the first tool. Count the places one figure lives in your business. It takes twenty minutes and costs nothing, and it will tell you more about what to do next than any of the reading.

If the number is small, you do not have this problem, and anybody selling you a system is selling you something you do not need. That happens more often than our industry admits, and telling you so is the reason this page has no form on it.

If it is large, you now know the size of it, in your own numbers, which is the only position from which any of the rest is worth buying - from us or from anybody.