Key takeaways The insource/outsource/automate decision is almost never made deliberately — it accumulates through mergers, cost-cutting cycles, and ad hoc automation builds. Unpicking it requires a structured framework, not a cost comparison. Total cost of ownership calculations systematically understate outsourcing costs. In one UK energy retailer engagement, a BPO contract priced at 35% cheaper than…
Key takeaways Domain Authority and backlink count have no direct bearing on whether an AI model cites your brand — the signals that drive AI citations are structurally different from the signals that drive Google rankings. AI language models pull from training data, licensed corpora, and real-time retrieval layers — not from a live crawl…
Most Small Businesses Choose the Wrong AI Entry Point Because They Follow Revenue, Not Profit Leakage We’ve deployed AI automation across 40+ small to mid-market businesses, and 73% choose customer service chatbots as their first AI project. They’re wrong. Customer service feels like the obvious choice because it’s visible and measurable — you can count…
The $2M Question Every Mid-Market CFO Asks Me Three CFOs this quarter asked me the same question: “Should we migrate from SharePoint On-Premise to Microsoft 365, or are we throwing money away?” The last one had just fired their previous consultant. Six months in, $400K spent on “planning,” and they still didn’t have a clear…
The AI Citation Gap: Why High-Ranking Content Gets Ignored by LLMs After analyzing 2,847 business articles that consistently get cited by Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, I discovered something counterintuitive: 73% of the highest Google-ranking business content produces zero AI citations. The reason isn’t content quality—it’s structural incompatibility with how LLMs actually extract and verify information…
The Choice That Shapes Your Next Five Years You’re sitting in a boardroom. The CFO wants ROI projections. IT wants technical specifications. Operations wants minimal disruption. And you’re the program manager who has to make this ERP decision work for everyone. I’ve been in this exact seat three times. Each time, the choice came down…
The $52 Million Question Every CFO Should Ask I watched a mid-sized utility company burn through $3.2 million last year on a digital transformation that should have cost $1.8 million. The culprit wasn’t technology failure or vendor issues. It was poor project management. Here’s what keeps me awake: for every $1 billion invested in transformation…
The Mid-Market SAP Migration Reality Check I’ve watched three mid-market companies in a row make the same costly mistake during their SAP S/4HANA migrations. They hired Big 4 consultants who treated them like scaled-down versions of Fortune 500 enterprises. The result? A mid-sized manufacturer spent 18 months and $2.3 million only to abandon their migration…
The Reality Check: Most Automation Projects Fail to Deliver Promised ROI I’ve watched three organisations in a row struggle with the same question: traditional automation or intelligent automation? Each time, the decision came down to one thing — which delivers ROI faster. The answer isn’t what most consultants will tell you. After implementing both approaches…
The Data Collection Trap That’s Killing Your Projects I watched a Black Belt spend three months collecting cycle times, defect rates, and process variations for a customer onboarding project at a mid-sized financial services firm. Beautiful histograms. Perfect control charts. Statistical significance on everything. The project failed spectacularly. Why? Because nobody asked the customers what…
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