The cost of doing nothing (or: waiting for the midterms)

Budget season, and the sentence lands in the room before the first number does: let's not commit to anything new until after the election. Everyone nods, and the revenue line that has been flat all year stays flat for another five months.

Nobody in that room is waiting on November. They're waiting on permission.

I've heard the sentence more than once this month, from founders with nothing in common except a flat line. Different companies, same reflex. And the reflex has a cost that never shows up on the agenda, because "doing nothing" doesn't get a line item.

Nothing on the ballot fixes your revenue engine.

"Let's wait until November"

The sentence sounds like prudence. It costs like a decision.

When a leadership team says it, this is what it means. The number has been missing for two, three, four quarters. Everyone has a theory about why, and nobody has checked. So the team does the thing that feels responsible and delays dealing with it, with a calendar date as cover.

The date is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Strip it out and the sentence reads: let's not deal with the missing number until we feel better about acting. Nobody would say that out loud. So they say November.

And to be fair to the careful CFO in the room: there's a narrow version of the argument that holds.

If your addressable market moves with a specific federal outcome, a tariff line, a tax treatment, a regulatory posture, then waiting to see that outcome is real risk management. Name the outcome. Wait for that one.

Almost nobody reading this qualifies. The thing being deferred isn't a bet on policy. It's a look under the hood of how the company wins customers, keeps them, and grows them. That answer isn't on any ballot.

It's in your own numbers, and it was there in June.

What the wait actually costs

Start with the calendar, because the wait is never the wait people think it is.

Nobody decides the week after an election.

Call it the second or third week of November.

Whatever gets decided then lands in the run-up to the holidays, when nothing gets built and nobody's buying.

January is ramp.

The number doesn't move before March.

That's not a six-week pause.

That's five months.

Now put a number on it. As an illustration only: say the company does $7M a year, flat, so roughly $580K a month.

A fix that starts in October is producing by January.

A fix decided in late November is producing in March.

Call it three months of production you don't get back.

If the fix moves the run rate by even 10%, that's about $175K of revenue that never shows up, against a decision that would have cost a fraction of it.

Your numbers will differ.

The ratio won't.

Take your monthly run rate, multiply by the months you're about to wait, and that's the floor of what "let's see what happens" costs.

It isn't a rounding error. It's the two quarters that were easiest to fix, because Q4 is when budgets are open and renewals get decided, and Q1 is when the new number gets set from whatever the engine produced last year.

The real worry is the wrong-plan risk, and it's a fair worry. Committing five months of effort to the wrong fix is worse than waiting.

But that argues for scoping the fix, not for doing nothing.

Thirty days to read the engine in your own numbers, across pipeline, planning, people, and performance.

The two or three levers that pay back fastest, worked inside one quarter.

Priced to pay for itself, structured so it can end when the quarter does. That's the size of commitment that makes the wrong-plan risk small and the do-nothing cost visible.

Decide the thing that isn't on the ballot

There's a decision you can make this week that has nothing to do with the election, and it's the only one that moves the number: find out why it's missing.

Not guess. Not defer. Find out, in your own scorecard numbers, which part of the engine is leaking. Then fix that part inside the quarter everyone else is writing off.

The founders who do this in October walk into January with a number they trust and a plan built from what the engine actually produces.

The ones who wait walk into January with the same flat line, a fresh target set on top of it, and a new reason to wait.

November will come and go either way.

Your number won't fix itself in the meantime.

Next step

If the number has been missing more than one quarter, grab us a time; you'll leave knowing whether the wait is costing you and where to look first.

By Jason Rigolli, Founder of Revved for Growth
over two decades rebuilding revenue engines for founder-led or family-owned B2B firms. Two-time co-founder. Most recently, commercial lead for the PE practice of a leadership-advisory firm, on the leadership piece of sponsor due diligence.