The Hidden Cost No One Measures

Every deal team tracks hours on deal work. Almost none of them track hours lost to waiting.

That's the gap. And it's significant.

Think about the mechanics. A VP sends a request to an analyst on Tuesday. The analyst is mid-diligence on something else, so it sits until Thursday. The VP chases it Friday. The answer comes back Monday - four working days after the question was asked.

During that window, the VP couldn't progress the analysis. But they didn't sit still either. They moved to other work, lost the thread, and when the answer arrived, spent another hour reorienting. The four-day wait became a five-day delay in practice.

Now run that pattern across six open workstreams. Across a four-week process. The compounding effect on timeline is substantial, and entirely invisible on any status report.

Why Waiting Is Structural, Not Personal

The instinct is to blame individuals. Someone was slow. Someone didn't prioritise correctly.

That diagnosis is almost always wrong, and it's dangerous because it leads to the wrong fix.

Waiting happens because of three structural failures, not personal ones.

Unclear ownership. When a request goes to a team rather than a named individual, it belongs to everyone and therefore no one. It will wait until someone decides it's their problem to solve.

Context-poor requests. Most requests that sit in inboxes are sitting there because the recipient doesn't have enough information to act. They need to ask a clarifying question, which takes time, so they do nothing until they have capacity to deal with the whole thread. A well-structured request - with clear context, clear output required, and a deadline - gets actioned faster. Not because the person is more capable. Because they don't have to think about what's being asked.

No shared visibility. On most deals, the only person who knows a request is outstanding is the person who sent it. No one else can see it, prioritise it, or flag that it's blocking progress. The blockage sits quietly until someone chases.

Three structural failures. All fixable. None of them about effort or attitude.

The Rework Tax

There's a secondary cost that rarely gets discussed.

When a delay exceeds two or three days, the context surrounding it degrades. The analyst who was closest to the work has moved on. Notes haven't been updated. Assumptions haven't been recorded.

When work resumes, it doesn't pick up where it left off. It picks up from the last clean checkpoint (which might be significantly further back). That recovery time is pure cost. No commercial output. No progression on the deal. Just overhead generated by the gap.

In a four-week process, two or three instances of this adds up to meaningful deal drag. Not drama. Just quiet, steady friction that pushes timelines out.

What Actually Fixes It

Three things, none of them complicated.

Name every action. Every request that leaves your team should have a single owner, a clear output, and a date by which it's needed. Not a vague deadline… a specific one.

Send requests with enough context to be actioned cold. Assume the recipient will read it in a ten-minute window between two other things. Make it easy to say yes or no without a follow-up.

Make open items visible to the whole team. A shared log of outstanding requests, updated in real time, means anyone can see what's blocking progress. Bottlenecks surface in hours, not days.

None of this requires new software. It requires discipline in how requests are made and tracked.

The Honest Question

If you looked at your last three deals and mapped every day where progress stalled because someone was waiting - what would that number be?

Most teams, if they're honest, would find it uncomfortable.

The deals that closed fastest didn't move faster because the market was better or the team worked longer hours. They moved faster because waiting was treated as a problem worth solving.