Time and Money
Every dollar a business spends on AI — tokens, upgrades, new agents, consultants, product licensing, custom app dev — is either buying that business time or making it money. Most companies never check which. We sat down with Fairway Advisors President Caleb Decker to talk about why that question is the whole game.
Caleb Decker has spent a career talking about metrics with customers. This summer, he uses these simple anchors — Time and Money — to kick off a complex conversation with his prospects and clients. We asked him to walk through it.
It's backwards, if anything. Money you can replace — borrow it, earn it, reinvest it. Time you can't. A CFO pulling 60-hour weeks already knows the math doesn't work. The real edge right now isn't cutting cost — it's knowing whether your AI spend is buying back hours, making money, or both.
It comes from a career in software, starting at Crowe here in Indianapolis, through MicroStrategy (now Strategy), with a focus on driving measurable business impact.
What's interesting is that, of course, AI is being put in place to help the company achieve its mission. So they do that, and then, twelve months later, they often find themselves on a journey they hadn't predicted, often absent the board-level impact metrics that matter.
If the business issues at hand — typically to grow sales, reduce customer friction, put in new CRM automations, and so on — aren't measured, and the impact of those issues isn't commonly understood by company leaders, the AI agents deployed will be equally confused. Models drift, answers become less accurate, and confidence in the AI suffers.
We see it regularly — it's less a story about one company than a pattern we run into on nearly every engagement. A team stands up an agent or a workflow for a real, specific pain point. It ships fast, it looks impressive, everyone in the room is genuinely pleased. Nobody wrote down what "success" meant in dollars or hours before they built it, so six or twelve months in there's no baseline to check it against — just a token bill and a support burden that both kept climbing quietly in the background.
That's the part that should worry a CFO more than the bill itself: not that the number went up, but that nobody can say whether it should have.
Where the hours actually go
For most mid-market companies — and plenty of local Indiana businesses — the time sink isn't strategy or the big swings. It's friction. Look at a typical week and you'll find hours disappearing into:
- Manual data aggregation. Pulling numbers out of disconnected ERP, CRM, and accounting systems just to build the Monday exec report.
- Repetitive workflows. Re-keying the same information between platforms, running on memory and a static SOP instead of a system.
- Delayed decisions. Waiting days for a report or analysis that should exist on demand.
None of that shows up on an invoice. It shows up on the calendar.
We help them identify the strategic issues and goals first, then the metrics we can adopt together to make sure the AI spend is actually driving results.
Pretty much, yes. Our unique capability — what we call the RangeFinder process — is helping a CEO and CFO identify the measurements that actually matter to them in time and money, then working backward from those to find the metrics that drive each one. On the time side that's usually office productivity and agentic solutions taking manual work off people's plates. On the money side it's agents and solutions tied directly to company growth — CRM, sales and marketing automation, the things that move revenue, not just activity.
And sometimes the "Time" conversation isn't about the org chart at all — it's about the owner. They want less of their own week spent inside the business, with AI improving productivity so the leadership team's time gets optimized too, not just the front line's. Either way, we don't start with the technology. We start by finding the number worth moving, and only then go build the thing that moves it.
No. Efficiency is doing the same work faster. Leverage is redesigning the process so the business scales without adding headcount or overhead. We're not chasing whatever model is newest, and we're not in the business of replacing people. We're trying to free up the most expensive hours in the building — the leadership hours — so they go toward strategy and client relationships instead of data entry.
The Time and Money gut-check
Run this before the next AI line item gets approved.
- Name the ledger first. Is this spend meant to buy back time, or make money? If nobody can answer in one sentence, ask your team to identify who's accountable for this AI work's results.
- Set the number — and keep it simple. It doesn't need to be complex; Time and Money measures are uniquely simple on the surface. Start with something durable you can use consistently, and let it grow from there. Crawl, walk, run.
- Check the semantic layer. If the agent is drawing on your SQL and fact data, know how that mapping was built and who owns it. That layer is where "confident and wrong" comes from.
- Watch SG&A, not just the invoice. AI spend creeps in from every direction — staff licensing, enterprise token costs, third-party vendor and hyperscaler solutions. Track the category, not just the line item.
- Re-check it at 90 days. A win in the demo isn't a win in production until the number you baselined has actually moved — and stayed moved.
Start this week, if you want a head start
- Audit the bottleneck — name the two workflows eating the most senior-leadership hours each week.
- Quantify the trade-off — put a number on the payroll hours and the strategic work not getting done.
- Pick one ledger — time or money — and build the roadmap around it.
The gray beards conversation was about keeping a human in the loop. This one is upstream of that — it's about deciding, before you spend a cent, which loop you're even trying to close: time, or money. Get that answer first, and every dollar after it has somewhere to report.
Ready to find more time, more money, or both? That's exactly what the RangeFinder process is for — play a round with Fairway Advisors and let's find the number worth moving.