This is a graph that shows the percentage of women who stay with their careers over time and you can see that for professional women, generally, they do a pretty good job of staying with their careers over the course of, you know, 20-or-so years. So about 15 percent of them leave over the course of a 20-year career.

For women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) -- A.K.A. pretty much all of us -- these numbers are abysmal. 60% leave over a 20-year career and it happens early too, right? You can see here that 37% are gone by seven years in which is huge. And I'm on this graph too; I'm somewhere over here leaving about 10 years into my career, so I'm in good company. E

Everything that I do in WIMDI and in my work is to move this pink line closer to this yellow line, and maybe even make it up to 100%. So that is some context for what I like to get up to in the world. Okay so let's get a little bit of context for why we're talking about business cases, because it's a funny little thing and you're probably wondering, well, "How does this relate to the pink line on the graph?" Well, my question for you is: Do you want to move up the ladder at work? Do you want to get a promotion? Do you want to, you know, have increased responsibility? If you do, then there's good news! Your boss probably does want to help you.

What Your Boss REALLY Thinks About Giving You A Promotion

When I work with leaders, I find that a lot of times they're really concerned with helping their staff develop; it's something they actively want to do. They're often incentivized and measured on those kinds of things by their own bosses themselves, so there's a lot of people out there who really do want to help. And what they say to me in these coaching sessions when they're telling me how they want to advance their staff is they say, "You know what? She's smart, she’s ambitious; I totally like her, and I'd love to promote her, but she's just not ready yet."

Who here has heard, "She's just not ready"? Has anyone said that about you? People have definitely said that about me at various points in my career and it's pretty common.

This is actually so common that studies show that only 72 women for every 100 men get promoted into the first layer of management at companies. So that comes from McKinsey and Lean In's Women in the Workplace Study in 2019. And this is the biggest leak in the so-called leaky pipeline of women as they move up the ladder (or as they, you know, descend down that pink line on that graph). 72 is really bad and it actually improves as you get more senior, or at least that's what they found in this study. A lot of women just never make it up past that first hurdle, so for me this is a conversation tonight about one of the many ways that we can improve women getting through that first hurdle.

Here's the inside scoop: When your boss says you're just not ready, this can mean a lot of things. A lot of it pretty gendered, but one of the things that it means is you suck at business, unfortunately; it's very sad.

Laura’s Story: A VP Title & 20% Raise

I want to tell you a little bit of a client story that will help illustrate this; this is my client Laura. I've changed her name, obviously, to protect her fabulous, wonderful self-identity. And Laura was stuck at the manager level for a really long time in her career, actually for a year and a half. Yikes! She had been trying, and trying, and trying, and asking, and advocating to get herself to move up to a director-level position; she was really frustrated.

When she and I met it had been a year-and-a-half already of trying to do that and when she talked to her boss, he said the old chestnut of, "You're just not ready". And Laura, being the excellent career-minded person that she was, asked for some feedback. She said, "well, is it because of my communication?" and her boss said, "Yes."

Laura nearly died; that really hurt her feelings and she left that conversation going, you know, "It's because I'm not confident enough. My boss is really hard to convince of things; he's a super-challenging guy. He always wants to know everything, and I just don't think I have the confidence to go head-to-head with him. I think he's picking that up and that's what's in the way.

But, when we talked to her boss, what her boss was actually thinking is, "She never really gives me all the information I need. It's not that she's not confident enough, I just don't know if what she's proposing is actually really a good idea for the business or not." And so, an important lesson here that Laura learned, and that I want y'all to learn tonight, is that style doesn't equal content, necessarily. And for women we tend to proactively think that that the style is the thing that's getting in the way.

We think it's the way we deliver the message; it's how we communicate; it's the confidence with which we approach a situation, and a lot of the narratives in the media really support that. Even performance review data supports that women tend to get way more feedback around communication style and, sort of, the way they show up at work, as opposed to more hard business-skill-focused feedback than men do.

There's a really good reason that we kind of reach for those explanations, but they're not necessarily accurate so just be cautious, if, like Laura, you're going, "Oh, this is probably a confidence thing," or, "This is a delivery thing." This communication thing might actually be content. And the good news is: If it's content that's actually easier to fix, in some ways. And the cool thing about Laura was that her content kind of did suck, right? Like, as lovingly as possible, Laura was a wonderful person and had some really good ideas but the way that she talked about them wasn't that compelling. So, she and I worked together for six months, we were able to fix that and something amazing happened: Laura got promoted to VP, which is such an amazing thing!

Now, if you remember from the very beginning, Laura just wanted to be a director. She actually moved up two whole levels within six months because she got so much better at being clear with her boss about what business opportunities she was offering him when she brought her ideas to the table.

This is really an amazing story. I've never been more excited than I've been for Laura when she got that yes, and that's the power of the thing that we're going to be learning tonight. It's the thing that can take you from somebody who has been trying for a year and a half to get your boss to see your potential to somebody who has got that promotion two levels up and your boss is saying it's a great decision. Best decision you ever made. Very exciting!

How Your Manager Thinks

Let's understand how managers think, because that's what Laura had to do from the beginning. She had to go, "Well, what is my manager looking for?" So we'll use this be-hoodied avatar of a software development manager here as an example of how managers make decisions, and I'll bring a little bit in as well of the way that I made decisions when I've been a manager. It's not just how male managers make decisions, it's also how I've done it.

The 5 Questions Managers Ask When Evaluating an Idea

Okay, so there are really five questions that most managers think about when they're evaluating an idea:

• Question #1: "What's the business value?", A.K.A.: what's in this for me, right? Or what's in this for us, even.
• Question #2: "What's this going to cost us?"
• Question #3: "What's the plan for us to get this value? Like it's all cool if we can have this pie-in-the-sky idea that we can make this money, but can we really do it?"
• Question #4: "Is it actually likely that we get this value?" So we've got a plan that's maybe feasible, but is it really likely to transpire the way that we're hoping?
• Question #5: "Is this really the best use of my resources? Or is there something else I should be doing instead of this particular idea that you've brought to me?"

We're going to go through all five of these points and look in detail at how these work, how bosses think about them, how you can talk about them so that you understand how to go to your boss with an idea with all these questions ready to answer, so that you get the yes that you're looking for.

The Business Alien

It really all boils down to making more money at the end of the day, but it's these 3 things. This is all the business alien knows about how the world of business works. If you take an idea to him you say, "Hey, Business Alien, I'm going to start a makeup company. You know, I'm Kylie Jenner. I've got a massive following on Instagram and I think that selling lip kits is the thing for me. Then he's going to go, "Okay why would you bother selling lip kits?" and you'd go, "Oh because people will buy them" and he goes, "Okay, well, why would I care that people buy it?" "Because when people buy it then they'll give me money." And he goes, "Oh I get it! That's why this is about business, because it's number one, making more money." So he's very, very literal and he will keep asking you why until he understands how the idea relates back to number one, two, or three on this list. Excellent! Thanks, business alien! Super helpful.

Okay so you might be going, "Hey weren't we talking about value? What does this weird alien have to do with anything, Holly? I don't get why you're sitting here telling me about this." And, yeah, we were talking about that, so let's connect the dots. If you want to create business value you have to tie your idea back to something that the Business Alien can understand, right? You don't want to present your boss with an abstract idea like "Hey, I want us to make lip gloss." You want to tie it back into the thing that the business alien will care about, A.K.A.: making money. You might be going, "Okay, well, what if my idea doesn't connect to one of those three things? What if I can't find a connection? Well, if that's the case for you, then actually maybe your idea just kind of sucks, right? That was a little bit the case for Laura.

At the beginning, she had some ideas that didn't really work. It might be that you haven't looked hard enough either so let's do some examples and I'll show you how this works in real life.

Let's start with idea number one: buy a haul truck. I'm a mining engineer, so I've picked a mining example. For those of you who aren't aware, haul trucks are those, like, giant, house-sized yellow trucks that drive around with rocks in the back of them on mine sites. I'm sure you've seen these around. My idea is that we will buy one more of these for our mine site to improve our production.

How to Quantify the Profitability of Your Idea

Okay so that's it, right? We just have to find one of those three reasons and then we've done it? We've convinced our boss, life is easy? Well not quite, we still have to quantify it. We can't just assert that the value's there. We need to know how much value. So, let's have a little bit of math time, friends. We'll come back to our idea, the successful idea, that we had of buying an extra hall truck and start there.

Okay, so I'm going to use an example of the last mine that I worked at, which is Detour Gold. It's a gold mine in Northern Ontario and we'll pull some data from 2018 that's publicly available online. In 2018 we know that at Detour Gold produced 621, 000 ounces of gold and we know the price of gold that year as well. That was $1269 per ounce. So overall, in 2018, we could do the math and we know that detour gold made about $788 million that year. Easy, right? So, again, we're trying to bring this back to the haul truck thing. So we know we made $788 million that year and we had 36 haul trucks operating at that time. So we can turn that into how much money we made per haul truck, which is about $22 million, right? Easy peasy!

If I bring another truck on board, it's a reasonable assumption to say that we'll probably make $22 million again, right? Simple. Great. So, the value of this is $22 million. Excellent idea! Much better than that 50-week vacation thing which earned us zero dollars and, in fact, cost us money and maybe customers.

The boss is going, "Okay, now this is getting interesting." Notice already that, "Hey, boss, I've got an idea that will make us $22 million" is already much more interesting than, "What if we buy one more giant yellow truck?" Much cooler, right? This is getting interesting, but obviously there are a few more questions and so the next thing that we're going to look at is what's it going to cost? It's not like somebody's just going to hand us $22 million for free, right? We have to go buy a truck and do all these other things to get that money in our hands.

Let's do a little more math and figure that out. Okay so we know that haul trucks cost about $5 million. That's a standard cost for a haul truck, and haul trucks last about five years before you have to replace them. You can actually keep using them for, like, you know, 15-20 years or something like that but, you know, they wear out - all the pieces, all the parts, and the hardware - so quickly that you basically have to replace them every five years anyways.

We've got a $5 million haul truck and we're going to use it over the course of five years. So that turns into a cost of about $1 million per truck per year. And that's the capital cost. That's just what it costs to buy the thing. Then, we have to actually run it, right? There are things like fuel costs and the person who drives the truck; we're going to wear out the tires eventually; it'll need oil changes; you have to pay the wages of the mechanics who fix it. All that stuff.

And then, not only that to run the truck, but it's going to move material and when you move that material, you'll have to send it through the mill and process it and turn it into gold bars, and then eventually sell it. There's this whole extra cost, not just of what it takes to run the truck, but the entirety of the production cycle for those rocks that the truck is going to carry. This has to be included, as well, in what we call an operating cost.

So, for that truck, the operating cost per truck, per year is going to be about $19.9 million. Way higher than the capital costs! Very expensive, right? So overall we're looking at about $21 million per year in total costs to run that truck. Cool, right? Cost of $21 million.

Question two, answered. Now you might be noticing, like I am, that that’s really close to the value that we said earlier; that $22 million. And we're like, "Oh, that sounds really good." Now suddenly it's almost the same as the cost.

Let's do some quick math and make sure that we're not messing this up too badly. Okay, so we know that the truck was going to bring us $21.8 million per year, and we know that it was going to cost us $20.9 million, so, in total, per year, the profit that we'll make is going to be $915,000 - just under a million buck!. So, thank god it's a positive number. That's very good. And actually, we're not just going to run this for a single year, we're going to be running this for five years, so we know that, overall, this project is going to be worth about $4.6 million in profit. So, excellent! It's positive. It has a million behind it, which I like.

The Importance of Planning: A Fyre Fest Case Study

Okay, so for those of you who don't remember, Fyre Fest was a music festival in 2017 that went famously, terribly, and ended up with some of the founders of it being put in jail for fraud. Very, very bad. Now it seemed like a good idea, initially, because Coachella, famously, in 2018 made $114 million in profit. Now some of that, probably, was the fact that Beyoncé was headlining. $114 million in profit is nothing to sneeze at; it seems like not bad value for your money and that actually is 23 haul trucks worth of profit, so, like, much better than my idea; in theory, a good concept.

They had what seemed like a really great event plan. They said they were going to get a whole bunch of really gullible rich kids to come and buy tickets that they were going to sell them on the idea of hosting a music festival on Pablo Escobar's island. They were going to use the specter of the drug trade, you know, on these gullible rich kids who obviously have never been involved in the drug trade and wouldn't understand that as being awful and dramatic, but instead as gritty and cool.

It's going to be on Pablo Escobar's island - super cool! They were going to sell it using supermodels and a bunch of adorable pigs, you know, frolicking together in the surf in these adorable videos that they put out on social media that make it all seem like paradise. They were going to tell people that they were going to have luxury villas so they'd be sleeping in these gorgeous places while they attend the music festival that had Blink 182, (I don't think that Blink 182 was the main headliner here, but I guess it's a draw for some people.) And then finally they said there were going to be gourmet meals and that you’ll have a delicious time while you're at this festival, too.

On paper it all worked, right? It seemed excellent. It actually sold a ton of tickets really fast. They sold tickets, but they didn't plan this event in literally any detail at all. Like none. They gave themselves six weeks to make this event happen, whereas normally it would have taken over a year when it wasn't on an island that was uninhabited and with experienced event planners. They had a totally inexperienced team. They had not enough time to do it. Famously, they googled "how to get a stage set up" four weeks before the event and then hired whoever they found on google to come and design their stage.

Nothing was figured out and they actually didn't even have enough space on the island for all the tickets that they sold. They couldn't put all the people who were going to come to this festival on the island and give them somewhere to sleep and crucially give them somewhere to have porta-potties. There was not enough room on the island for all the porta-potties they needed for everyone to attend the event, which was a crisis because if you're going to do anything, make sure people have porta-potties, right? They didn't manage that at Fyre Fest.

It all went bad in the end; the wonderful event plan that they had, with the gullible rich kids who were going to be coming, turned into a disaster with, instead, a bunch of entitled rich kids who were angry, and drunk, had just gotten off a plane and hadn't eaten in hours. Instead of doing it on Pablo Escobar's island, as they had planned - turns out that was way too small - so they held it in, effectively, an abandoned parking lot on another island.

This place was super scary if you look at the photos, there are all these giant cliffs dropping off into the ocean, that I'm certain drunk kids would just literally fall off like lemmings.

Not good, not good. Instead of supermodels and pigs, they found that no Jenners, no Hadids, and no pigs actually attended the event at all. It was all a marketing scam and these models did not show up. Instead of luxury villas, they ended up with FEMA relief tents that blew over almost in the wind and got soaking wet in a rainstorm, making everybody's beds totally wet and uninhabitable. Instead of gourmet meals, they had, famously, the Instagram sandwich which, if any of you remember, was a very sad Styrofoam container with a slice of bread, a very sad piece of cheese, and salad with no dressing. It blew up all over the internet, and it was very, very bad for poor Billy McFarland and his business partner Ja Rule, who, at the end of the event said, "I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hoodwinked, and led astray by the Fyre Festival organizers".

An excellent example of Ja Rule trying really, really hard to cover his own ass in the in the wake of this colossal mess that he had created. But actually what they did was just not plan it, at all.

Making a Realistic Plan

The lesson here is to make a realistic plan with realistic timelines. Otherwise, all that value that you talked about earlier is irrelevant; it just won't happen. And you will end up like Ja Rule, hoodwinked, led astray and bamboozled. Or worse, like Billy Mcfarland and in federal prison for fraud. Yikes.

All right, so let's come back to the example of the haul truck because we're trying hard not to be like the Fyre Fest organizers. With a haul truck here's what we need to do: Number one, we're going to have to phone up Caterpillar who's going to sell us the truck and say, "Hey, we've got five million dollars. We want you to send us a truck." Then we're going to have to arrange shipping.

Getting a whole truck on a mine site is not really a simple thing; you can't just drive it there. It's literally the size of a house; it will not fit on a highway and so it has to come in pieces over many, many weeks. You have to have somewhere to store all these pieces, and you have to arrange all the logistics around shipping the pieces of this whole truck to you. Then, you need to create a laydown, which is basically somewhere on the mine site that, for several weeks, you can put all those pieces back together to turn it from a pile of haul truck pieces into a truck that works. You obviously need to hire the mechanics who will do all that building on the laydown of the hall truck, and they need the tools to do it.

Finally, just like at Fyre Fest you need to make sure that you have rooms and meals at camp, preferably better than “the sandwich”, or you will definitely have a revolt on your hands. And because we learned the lessons of Fyre Fest, we need to make sure that there's a porta-potty at the laydown so that people can use the washrooms.

The timeline for that is probably about 2-3 months. That would be typical for doing all the things that we just talked about on a mine site. What could possibly go wrong? Just like what Ja Rule would have said six weeks out from Fyre Fest.

Three Questions to Help Assess Risk

Okay, so starting with the value we had -- that $22 million -- let's go through these questions. So, are my assumptions valid? Well, when we made that $22 million calculation, we assumed a couple things. We assumed that the trucks would carry the same amount of material as all the rest of them had been carrying in 2018. We assumed that we'd get a certain price for the gold that was inside of it, and we assumed that the rocks inside of the trucks carry a certain amount of gold, right?

The grade of the rocks is consistent with what it's been over the last year, so each of those assumptions are probably okay to make, but there's a lot that could change. When we say “What could go wrong?” Well it might be that gold prices go up or down; it might be that next year, when the truck is in operation, we're actually mining in a different area and we have less high grades than we had now; we might find that we don't get quite the payload out of the trucks that we expected, like, that they don't carry as many rocks as we thought.

Either the shovel operators are not very well-trained and so they're not filling them all the way up to the tippy top, or there’s some problem with tire pressure and they can't. There are all kinds of reasons why they might not be as full as we expected. It could even be that the trucks, once we have them, can't get filled up by shovels because the shovels are already busy filling the trucks that we've got. If they're at full capacity and working 24/7, adding one more truck might not actually help at all. It might just be one more truck burning fuel but not really moving any extra dirt.

These are all things that we'll have to double check with the mine planners to understand where it is that we're going to be mining, what our assumptions are going to be around how much gold will get in the rocks, what the gold price is going to look like, and whether or not we can assume that we'll fill up the trucks in a similar way. If we don't get that right, there could be some big consequences. If we got the thing wrong about the shovels, for example, if the shovels are already fully busy filling up the trucks that we have and we add one more truck, that could wipe out the value entirely and we'd be left just with the costs and no extra rocks.
That would be very bad, so that's a check we're going to want to do before we take this idea to our boss.

• Assessing Risk to Value

  Let’s look at the cost; $21 million. Let's ask the same questions here, “Are the assumptions valid?” Well, when we look at that cost, we know the capital costs pretty well. We're pretty sure that when Caterpillar quotes us $5 million it's going to cost us $5 million. The only thing that might be different if we were buying that truck today, is, we know that shipping costs have gone up a lot during coronavirus, 30-60% in some cases, and so we might have the portion of that cost that's represented by the logistical challenge of moving all that material to site, that might be a little bit higher.
  
  Then, we've got a whole bunch of assumptions built in around the cost for the whole operation. Remember when we did the operating costs? We didn't include just the cost of the fuel and the oil changes and all those things that seem associated with the truck, we had to include all of the costs for the full life cycle of that dirt that we were moving. There are a lot of assumptions built in there, including, how much money it costs us to take those rocks from being solid rocks in the ground and blast them so they're in smaller pieces; what the cost looks like for us to send it through the mill; and how much they have to spend on chemicals to turn that into a gold bar.

• Assessing Risk to Cost

  There are a lot of things that could change there as well, and so if we get that wrong by a little bit, that could be complicated for us. That's another thing that we're going to have to check in on with the mine planners and go, "Okay, so we've got this set of assumptions about our operating costs. Is there any reason that those are going to change?" Operating costs can change by quite a bit on a mine site.

  A famous example of this was back in the late 2000s to early 2010s. We were in a big commodity super cycle, and so mines were pumping out material, going as hard as they could trying to move as many rocks as possible. And one of the consequences of that was that you basically couldn't find tires anywhere for a haul truck. They were expensive, first of all, $40,000 or higher and haul trucks need a lot of tires. They need six tires so you're looking at, basically, a quarter of a million dollars every time you want to change a set of tires on a truck; a ton of money. But, more importantly, other than the cost, you basically couldn't get them. Demand was so high that you'd be waiting six months to a year just to get an order of tires in.
  
  There was a time where I could call up Caterpillar and order a new truck, and I could get the truck, but I wouldn't be able to get the tires for six months to a year, which might not have been helpful. The cost profile of my site might have changed drastically during that time, so it might not be valid anymore for us to go out and make the investment; the operating costs associated with the tires could become so high, that the calculation that we're doing now around cost would be way too low.

• Assessing Risk to Profit

  It's important to think about whether those costs are likely to change over the length of the project. All right, our profit for this was $4.6 million, which was just under a Mill -- $915,000 a year, and I want to take a second here to look at this part of the question that we've been asking, "What could go wrong, and how wrong?" We've got $915,000 of profit per year and our costs are $20.9 million. Well, $21 million per year. So really that means that we only have a 4.3% margin of error. If my costs were 5% higher, suddenly there would be no more profit; I would not be making money on this deal; it would be a money losing venture to buy this truck.

  4.3% is a small confidence interval for all the variability that I just described around gold price, around whether we're going to be mining in the same place, around whether or not tire costs or shipping costs increase. It would be easy to see a budget changing by about 5%? It has me a little bit worried when we think about it that way.
  
  When we think about what could go wrong, and how wrong, things don't have to go very wrong for this project to not work well. At this point, our boss is likely going, "Oh my god. This is terrifying! I don't know if this is a good project for us, because there’s not a lot of wiggle room to control the cost perfectly. We have to be exactly right on what value we're going to get out of it." That makes me nervous.

Assessing Risk to The Plan

Let's look at what our plan was: when we look at this list -- calling Caterpillar, arranging shipping, creating the laydown, getting the mechanics, and making sure they have somewhere to stay -- most of these things are going to be relatively straightforward. There might be a two-week delay, for example, in finding people, finding somewhere to stay in the camp if it's full, but it's not going to be a huge difference. The big things on this list -- the big complexity on this list -- is going to be whether Caterpillar's got trucks in stock right now and how quickly they could get to us. There might be a short lead time, or it could be really long if there's been a lot of demand; that's a big variable for us. And the other big variable, is whether or not we have space to create that laydown somewhere.

Sometimes, depending on how much space you need, (you see this less with trucks and more with shovels), but depending on where you need to create that space, you might not be able to create it on demand; you might have to wait until a certain point in the mine plan until there's an area that you're not planning on being in and occupying for a little while.

Lesson: Fragile Business Cases Don’t Get the Green Light!

The biggest variables here in our plan are creating that laydown and phoning up Caterpillar. So, again, these are things that we're going to have to investigate, because if we were in the middle of, 2012 and we wanted to do this, we'd call it Caterpillar and they'd say, "Ha! Fat chance! We can't get you the tires. It'll be a year and a half." And that would really change a lot of assumptions that we've made around how much value we think we can get out this project, so we're going to look into that with both Caterpillar and the mine planners when it comes to where we could put that laydown and when we could put it there.
Because if we get it wrong, this is going to change things for us.

Alright, so we've looked through these 3 questions: Are my assumptions robust? What could go wrong? And how wrong could it go if it does go wrong -- for all of value cost and plan, and at this point, what we can see is that fragile business cases don't get the green light. This one is actually feeling a little bit more fragile than I'd like because of that low margin of error on our profit, on our costing, and our value.

Lesson: Look at The Risk So You Can Mitigate It

Some of these risks I'd be able to address just by talking with mining engineers, talking with Caterpillar, getting into more detail about the plan, but some of them will probably always be there. There are always going to be cost overruns from time to time, and so, it's important for us to quantify that risk and make plans to mitigate it before we talk about it with our boss, because otherwise it won't seem like a very good plan. Alright, right now the boss is going, "Alright, so the margin on this is not ideal. It's not really making as much money as I'd like, as safely as I'd like. It's kind of a maybe. Is this really our best idea? Is there something else that we could be doing instead?"

Opportunity Cost: A Fyre Fest Case Study

We're really talking about opportunity cost here, which is the idea that if I do something, I will lose the ability to do something else; it's the cost of taking that opportunity. One way to look at this is: If I had five million dollars to spend, would I spend it on this project or would I spend it on something else that would get me more value, easier, quicker, faster, with less risk? Or another way to look at it is: If I wanted to make $4.6 million, the same amount of money as I'm making here, is this really the best way to do it? Can I find another way to make that $4.6 million that works better for me? So obviously neither of these questions are what they asked at Fyre Festival. One of the most ironic things about Fyre Fest actually, is that it was an incredibly silly plan; Fyre Fest was never really supposed to be a music festival, it's actually an app.

Fyre Media was a software company that was making an app that would help you book acts like Ja Rule or Beyoncé to come and play at your event. For example, if you wanted to have Kelly Rowland sing at your wedding, in theory you could have used the Fyre app to do it. They conceived Fyre Festival as a way of promoting the app, as in, "Oh, we booked all these amazing acts using the Fyre app -- and now they're playing at the festival." But actually this was deeply insane as a plan. Imagine if they had spent all the time and money they were going to spend having this boondoggle of a Fyre Festival on Google Ads? What if they had just paid Kendall Jenner the $250 million they paid her for the promo and instead got her to plug the app? I mean in that case, they would have had a few more customers; they definitely wouldn't have gone to jail for fraud and they'd still be in business.

Arguably, that would have been a much better approach. It would have been way less complicated; it certainly would have cost them less money and they'd still have their freedom. I would argue that, actually, Fyre Festival’s big failing, other than planning, was that they didn't do the opportunity/cost analysis and go, "Hold on. What are we doing here? Should we really be running a music festival or is there any better way to do the thing we're trying to do?" And they honestly just got caught up in wanting to run a cool festival on Pablo Escobar's island.

Improving Your Ideas by Looking at Options

We’re not going to be them. We're going to look at this rationally, ahead of time, before we sell 8,000 tickets to a bunch of entitled rich kids. Okay, so back to our idea of buying a haul truck. We know that we want to make $4.6 million from this. How else could we do it? How else could we make that $4.6 million that doesn't involve this whole truck? Well, we know that our plan was to buy one new truck, and that we have 36 trucks on site right now. So really all we're talking about here is a 2.8% production increase. That's it! 2.8% is tiny. The cool thing -- one of my favorite things -- about working on mines is how tiny increases turn into giant sums of money. If I got 2.8% better at answering emails or doing anything that I do in my current day-to-day job, nobody would give me $4.6 million, but on a mine site that happens.

What that looks like, if we took that 2.8 percent increase and tried to increase production, you know, 24 hours a day. How much would that turn out to be for our existing haul truck fleet? That's only 40 minutes a day. 40 minutes more production in a day on our existing haul trucks would net us $4.6 million. Amazing! Easy, right? We can find a way to do that! Let's get creative.

Here's my idea number three: We're going to hire the spouses of the people who work on the mine site right now as drivers to come in and cover the lunch shift and breaks the haul truck drivers take on our existing fleet of 36 trucks. This is not an original idea with me, it’s actually quite common. You see this a lot in Australia, actually, and BHP famously did it as part of a diversity, equity and inclusion plan that they had back in 2016, or something like that.

Lesson: The Best Idea Wins

Let's take a look at this excellent plan that I've come up with: we're going to stagger our lunch shifts so that they're not all at the same time. We'll maybe run them from 10 am to 2 pm or something like that, 10:30 to 1:30. Everybody gets a slightly different lunch shift so that we can hire just a few people to cover all those lunches. We're going to hire those spouses to work for the hours when their kids are in school. A lot of times on mine sites spouses are not working because they're stay-at-home parents. And so, if we can make it so that they're not working full shifts, but they're just working when their kids are in school, then that'll work well for them.

This will be great because the families will get more money, the spouses will be employed for part of the day, they'll be more likely to stay in town and we'll have less turnover in our employees; we won't have to train as many people, which will be excellent; there would be more working women -- and not always women. Not all spouses are women on mine sites, though by and large what we're talking about here is employing more women, so that's a really good thing, and hence why BHP was doing this as an intervention to help their diversity, equity, and inclusion. And it's going to cost us about $1 million less per year, because that's how much in capital cost we have to pay to buy a haul truck. That $5 million over five years is $1 million per year that we don't have to pay, because we're just having these people use the trucks we already have. Awesome, right? Really good idea! So many good things about it.

In the end if I do all the math, we can make $9.6 million just by hiring a couple wives to come in while their kids are at school and run some haul trucks. Excellent! I love it, and it's way less risky than the other plan because I don't have to worry about shipping, I don't have to worry about all this complexity that we had with the previous plan. I just have to hire a couple of people, train them using the trainers that we already have on site, send them away to the hall trucks, and send them home with a paycheque. Amazing. Alright, so now my boss is, like, floored. Very excited, like, "What? Let's definitely do this!" Hearts are in his eyes.

So now your boss is going, "Oh, and by the way, let's get you on some more strategic projects, because this was a really, really smart idea." And then we're like, "Hooray we've done it! We're just like Laura! Our boss is obsessed with us and we're going to become a VP. Yay! Yay! Yay! Excellent."

Okay so the lesson here, really, is that the best idea wins. You'll notice that we didn't end this presentation with a perfectly crafted idea that I had from the beginning that we ended up adopting. We abandoned the idea that I started with. We're not buying a new whole truck. We're doing something else entirely. We're doing that because we can make way more money, so I really want you to understand that as you go through this process. The idea that you come in with, might not be the idea that you pitch to your boss. That's totally okay.

I want you to do the work ahead of time so that you pitch the better idea to your boss, not the original idea which would have had him go, "Uh, I just don't think it's worth the money." And I might not have fully understood why if I hadn't gone through all five of those questions. It's really important to do this work ahead of having that conversation with your boss.