90 seconds. What the decision you keep putting off has already cost you.
Every leader has one decision that has sat open too long. Most never price the delay. No pitch, just the number.
Every leader has one decision that has sat open too long. Pick the one that's yours.
What does the business bring in per year?
Annual revenue. A round number is fine.
Or enter your own:$
How much more could the business grow this year if that decision were made today?
Your honest estimate. Lean conservative.
5%
1%30%
How many months has the decision been open?
Count from the day you first knew.
6 months
136
How many people work closely with the person or situation behind this decision?
The people in their orbit.
5 people
120
What is the average annual pay of those people?
A rough average is fine.
Or enter your own:$
The Opportunity Tax
$0
Missed growth to date$0
Team drag to date$0
Next 12 months, if it stays open: $0
That's what the delay is costing you.
Missed growth never shows up on a financial statement.
Drag on the team
That total already includes team drag, what this pulls out of the people around it. We set it at 30 percent, the conservative floor of the research, which finds one underperformer can drag a team down 30 to 40 percent.
30%
10%40%
Not convinced it's that high? Move it up and watch the total climb.
Show the growth line as profit
Think that growth is revenue, not profit? Flip this. We apply your margin to the growth line. The team drag stays as payroll output.
Net margin
See the full breakdown.
What the delay costs beyond the dollar figure, and the one question that tells you what to do about it.
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The full breakdown
The number is the smaller cost.
Direct cost. The growth you did not capture. That is the headline number, and it runs every month the decision stays open.
Compounding cost. The delay trains the team to wait. High performers notice. Pace slows around the open decision.
Hidden cost. The decisions you stop making because this one is still open.
If you also run the Tolerance Tax on the same person, do not add the two drag figures together. Both use the same drag number, so the team cost is already counted once.
What the research says
Research shows one underperforming team member can drag team performance down by 30 to 40 percent.
Felps, Mitchell & Byington, controlled team experiment (about 40 four-person teams, one trained actor), as reported by Sutton in the Wall Street Journal and by Knowledge at Wharton. The 2006 paper is the literature review; the figure is from the experiment.
Housman & Minor, Toxic Workers (Harvard Business School, WP 16-057) put the cost of a single toxic worker, someone terminated for a conduct violation, at about $12,500, more than the roughly $5,300 a top-one-percent performer returns. Toxic workers, not general underperformers.
Cornerstone OnDemand with Harvard Business School researchers found complementary seating produced a 13 percent productivity gain and a 17 percent effectiveness gain (2016, one large technology company, 2,000+ employees). Vendor study.
Lazear, Shaw & Stanton, The Value of Bosses (NBER). Replacing a bottom-tier boss with a top-tier boss raises team output about as much as adding one worker to a team of nine.
McKinsey, Decision making in the age of urgency (2019, 1,259 executives). 61 percent say most of their decision-making time is used ineffectively. Fast, high-quality deciders are twice as likely to report strong returns. It gives no dollar figure for delay.
The number tells you what waiting costs. It cannot tell you what sits behind the delay. After a quick conversation, we bring you the answer. No pitch. No selling.