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You've been right about this for a while.
Now put a number on it.
The Missing Line Item: a ten-minute reckoning of what financial pressure is costing your organisation. Your numbers, every benchmark sourced, nothing invented.
For the people, safety and L&D leaders who've been making this case on instinct - and losing to items that arrive with numbers attached.
Your figures, your machine · every benchmark sourced · conservative on purpos
Here's how the meeting usually goes.
You raise it. The CFO asks what it's costing.
And the room waits.
You've got the instinct, the anecdotes, the resignation you still think about at 11pm. What you don't have is a number - so the item slides back down the list, behind three things that turned up with figures attached.
That's not a failure of nerve. Nobody funds a problem nobody can size.
So this isn't a calculator.
It's a briefing pack for a conversation you've been putting off.
Four questions get asked in that room. Every time.
How did you arrive at that number?
Isn't this the wellbeing spend we already approved?
Why now and not next year?
And what does doing nothing cost us?
Ten minutes with this and you walk in with an answer to all four - in your own organisation's figures, every benchmark sourced and dated on the page.
I spent two decades in rooms where numbers got approved or sent back.
This is built for the first kind.
One page. Ten minutes. A number you can defend.
What you'll walk out with
What you already know
three figures you can find without commissioning anything or asking anyone's permission. Last year's unplanned resignations, unplanned leave across your headcount, and what you spent on people initiatives - next to the honest count of how many of them you could prove moved anything. Three minutes, and you're already ahead of the last meeting.
What you're carrying and haven't counted
your headcount against published Australian research. Prevalence, hours lost, cost per head, every figure sourced and dated on the page. This is where the number stops looking like a rounding error.
What the arithmetic can't reach
four ways this travels that no ledger can price. One of them you can put a real number against. Three of them you can't - and knowing which three is worth more than the total.
Also inside
The four questions you'll be asked in that room
and exactly where on the page your answer to each one sits
A second road to the same number
an independent Australian study that restricts its estimates far more tightly than most, arriving in the same postcode as your own arithmetic
Your spend per head, next to the modelled cost per head
two numbers, side by side, no commentary required
A summary band that reads on its own
three figures and a date, comprehensible to somebody who never saw the blank version
Every source, dated, on the back page
so the first sceptical question in the room has an answer before it's finished being asked
Three things you can do on Monday that don't involve me
real moves, no purchase required
These figures aren't added together. They measure overlapping things, and stacking them would hand you a total you couldn't defend. This one you can.
You should probably know whose arithmetic you're about to use.
Meet Tara Saxon
I'm a behavioural change expert. Organisations bring me in when the performance data stops explaining itself.
Before that: two decades inside banking and commercial finance - Arthur Andersen, NAB, BankWest, an HSBC-Woolworths joint venture, American Express. Risk, funding, contracts, infrastructure finance. Which means I've sat on both sides of the table you're about to walk up to. The side asking for the money, and the side deciding whether the case stacks up.
Here's what that teaches you. The cases that got approved were never the ones with the biggest numbers. They were the ones where every figure traced back to something real, and the person presenting knew exactly where their own argument was weakest - and said so first, before anyone in the room could say it for them.
That's how this ledger is built. Conservative on purpose. Sourced on the page. Honest about what it can't reach.
It won't flatter your organisation. It'll hold up in the room. That's the only thing you need it to do.
B.Com, M.App.Fin., ICF-accredited PCC, Certified Money Coach.
Walk in with the number.
Walk out with a mandate.
Ten minutes now, or another quarter of being right and unfunded.
Everything else in your patch waits well. This one charges interest - it's the only item on your list that gets more expensive for being left, because the whole cost of it is happening quietly while nobody's counting.
Your figures. Sourced benchmarks. One page you can hand to somebody who thinks in dollars.
Walk in with the number. Walk out with a mandate.
Ten minutes now, or another quarter of being right and unfunded.
Everything else in your patch waits well. This one charges interest - it's the only item on your list that gets more expensive for being left, because the whole cost of it is happening quietly while nobody's counting.
Your figures. Sourced benchmarks. One page you can hand to somebody who thinks in dollars.