★ Lead lever
Onboarding & tribal knowledge
New hires take months to reach full productivity — typically 3–6 months for technical roles — and replacing someone runs from half to two times their salary.4
"Cut two weeks off every new hire's ramp."
ROI Calculator
What the pain costs vs. what Halyard costs
Knowledge friction — ramp time, status chasing, searching, interrupting your best people — is mostly invisible because nobody invoices for it. Put your numbers in. These are illustrative models, not measured outcomes, and every assumption is yours to change.
Your team
Advanced — the five levers conservative defaults
Honesty dial
The levers overlap — status chasing and searching are both "finding information." The haircut keeps the model from counting the same saved hour twice.
Addressable pain / year
$467k
after a 30% overlap haircut
vs
Halyard / year
$10,188
50 people · Growth
46× on a conservative read — and that is a single year.
Read before you quote this. These are illustrative models with stated assumptions,
not measured customer outcomes. A 30% overlap haircut is applied so we never count
the same saved hour twice (adjust it under Advanced). Onboarding is the most defensible
line — ramp and replacement costs are the hardest numbers to argue with.
Fixed assumptions: value/hour = loaded cost ÷ 2,000 hrs · 240 workdays · 48 work-weeks · new-hire ramp recovery factor 0.40 · interruption recovery ≈23 min (a popular estimate, not a measured constant) · baseline search 1.8 hr/day (≈20% of the workday, per McKinsey) · seniors = 20% of team · Halyard = flat workspace band, billed annually (Team $3,588/yr up to 25 people · Growth $10,188/yr up to 100 · Business $29,988/yr for 100–250).
Where the cost comes from
Five places knowledge friction quietly bills you
Each lever maps to a documented cost of work without a living knowledge layer. We use the conservative end of every range, and cite the source so you can check our math.
"What changed & when" status
Asana's research puts about 58% of the day on "work about work" — coordination and status-chasing rather than the job itself.3
"Your team loses a day a week to 'what's the status of X?'"
Ask-once capture
McKinsey estimates knowledge workers spend roughly a fifth of the workday just searching for and gathering information.1
"Answer it once. Never get asked again."
Expert routing
Frequent interruptions carry a real recovery cost — more stress, more time pressure — and your seniors absorb the "quick question" tax.2
"Stop taxing your best people with questions a search should answer."
Maintenance tax → $0
Wikis rot because upkeep is manual and invisible, so it never gets prioritised. Halyard accrues knowledge from work people already do — no chore to skip.5
"The knowledge base nobody has to maintain."
- Search time — McKinsey Global Institute, "The Social Economy" (2012): knowledge workers spend "roughly 20 percent of the workday" searching for and gathering information. The model expresses this as a ~1.8 hr/day baseline you can adjust.
- Interruptions — Gloria Mark et al., "The Cost of Interrupted Work" (CHI 2008): interrupted work measurably raises stress and time pressure. The popular "23 minutes to refocus" number comes from an interview, not this paper — the model treats 23 min as an adjustable assumption, not a cited fact.
- Work about work — Asana, Anatomy of Work Global Index 2023: 58% of knowledge-worker time goes to coordination rather than skilled work. Vendor survey, self-reported — directional, not independent research.
- Ramp & replacement — Gallup, "This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion" (2019): replacing an employee costs "one-half to two times" their annual salary. Time to full productivity is typically 3–6 months for technical roles (HR industry benchmarks).
- Knowledge-base upkeep — we found no rigorous public figure for documentation maintenance burden, so we don't claim one. This lever defaults conservatively and is entirely yours to set.
The gap is the pitch
A four-figure tool against five- and six-figure pain. Bring us your real numbers and we'll walk the model with you — no inflated claims, just the assumptions on the table.