30+ years of real-world experience. Distilled into articles that help executives make better decisions.
I spent 30 years inside Canadian telecom call centres. And in every workforce planning review, the shrinkage assumption was the same: 15 to 20 percent. Not because anyone had calculated it. Because someone had written it in a textbook once, and it had never been challenged since.
Every call centre director I have ever worked with has said some version of the same thing: "We just need more people." Sometimes they are right. More often, they are not. Chronic understaffing is almost never a hiring problem. It is a planning problem.
I have sat in enough executive meetings to know what the first 45 minutes look like. Someone's financial numbers do not match someone else's. By the time everyone agrees on what the numbers actually are, the meeting is half over. And no decision has been made yet.
The most expensive decisions are not the wrong ones. They are the right decisions made too late. The market moved. The competitor acted. The customer churned. And by the time the monthly report landed on the desk, the moment had passed.
The Budget vs Actual report is the most widely used financial management tool in business. It is also one of the most consistently misused. Not because the numbers are wrong. But because accuracy is not the same as truth.
Early in my career, I sat in budget reviews where the same arguments happened every year. The numbers were disputed. The assumptions were unclear. The process took months. I decided to build something different. What followed saved more than $4 million annually.
The worst kind of attrition is not the employee you saw coming. It is the one you did not. The high performer with no visible warning signs — that departure is expensive. And it almost always comes as a shock. It should not.
Most attrition reports look the same. A percentage. Maybe a comparison to industry benchmark. What they almost never include is a number with a dollar sign in front of it. That omission determines how much attention attrition gets and how seriously the board takes it.
There is a version of the AI story that gets told at every conference, in every vendor pitch. It goes like this: AI will look at your data and tell you what to do. I want to challenge that story — not because AI is not powerful, but because this version is setting up a specific and expensive failure.
Let me be direct about what BuildAI Digital actually is. It is not a business intelligence platform. It is not a data visualisation tool. It is 30 years of real-world experience — inside large corporations, where being wrong cost millions — available to you 24 hours a day.