The business case

Why PaceVIO pays for itself — before it prevents a single resignation.

The math, the value add, and honest answers to every question an owner, manager, or investor will ask before buying in.

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The problem, in dollars

The Turnover Tax

SHRM estimates replacing an employee costs 50–200% of their annual salary — the low end for frontline roles, the high end for leadership and specialized technical roles — in recruiting fees, ramp time, and lost productivity while the role sits open or a new hire gets up to speed. The warning signs are almost always there weeks before the resignation letter — they just aren’t surfaced anywhere a manager is looking. PaceVIO’s entire value case rests on one idea: catching that weeks-early signal is worth paying for, because the alternative is paying for the departure instead.

Source: SHRM, “The Myth of Replaceability”

The math

Calculate your own ROI

Don’t take our $75,000 example on faith — drag in your own company size, average salary, and a conservative guess at how many people this saves you this year.

Plug in your own numbers

40 employees
$75,000
75% of salary
Industry-cited range: 50–200% of salary
1
Growth plan · $4,188/yr
13.4x
return on your PaceVIO investment
$56,250 saved vs. $4,188 spent — $52,062 net gain

Replacement cost (50–200% of salary) is SHRM’s published estimate, not a PaceVIO claim. Set it conservatively and the case still holds.

The value add

Every layer maps to a business outcome

Not features for their own sake — each layer of PaceVIO exists to move a specific number that matters to the business.

Manager Coach

Manager leverage

AI drafts the recognition message and the weekly digest. A manager gets back 1–2 hours a week that used to go to remembering things, not leading people.

Team Board

Retention at scale

Recognition and team health become visible to everyone, not just tracked in one manager's head. What gets seen gets repeated.

Growth Path

First-time manager effectiveness

A new manager with no training can still run a real growth conversation, because the framework — tiers, milestones, skills — already exists.

Proof, before month one

You don’t have to wait a year to know it’s working

Three leading indicators show up inside the 14-day trial, long before a single retention number is provable.

1–2 hrs / manager / week

Manager time saved

The AI-drafted digest and recognition messages remove the prep work. Across five managers, that's 20–40 hours of leadership time bought back every month — time that goes back into actually leading, not remembering.

First login, day one

Blind spots exposed

The moment an owner sees that four people on the team haven't been recognized or checked in on in two weeks, the tool has already paid for the attention it took to look.

48-hour close window

Pulse response velocity

Pulse checks are 3 questions, anonymous, and closed automatically in 48 hours. A high response rate in that window is proof the team will actually engage with something this light — unlike the surveys they've learned to ignore.

Questions before you buy in

Every objection, answered honestly

The questions real owners and managers ask before they trust a new tool with their team — no hedging, no HR-speak.

It's the opposite. At 25–30 people you're too big for the founder to personally track every person's growth and morale, and too small to justify an HR hire or an enterprise platform. That gap is exactly who PaceVIO is built for — you're not the exception, you're the target.

Good culture at 12 people survives because the founder is in every conversation. Good culture at 40 people survives because someone built a system to keep it going without the founder in every conversation. PaceVIO is that system — it doesn't replace a good culture, it protects one as you grow past the size where it holds together on its own.

SHRM estimates replacing an employee costs 50–200% of their salary in recruiting, ramp time, and lost productivity. On a conservative $75,000 average salary, that's $37,500–$150,000 per departure. Every PaceVIO plan costs less than that before you've even prevented one. Use the calculator above to check the arithmetic against your own numbers.

Because "be better at recognition" isn't a plan a busy manager can execute on a Tuesday. PaceVIO tells them specifically who to recognize, why, and hands them a drafted message — the cognitive load of remembering is the system's job, not theirs. Good intentions don't survive a crunch. A system does.

Most of those tools ask the manager to do more work — fill out a review, run a survey, log a check-in. PaceVIO is built to be the opposite: the AI drafts, the manager approves or edits, done in under two minutes. If a feature takes longer than that, it doesn't ship. That's a design constraint, not a slogan.

One afternoon. Add your company, invite your managers, define role tiers for your existing job titles (AI helps draft these), and you're running. No implementation consultant, no six-week onboarding, no CSV import wizard.

That's the real risk with any tool, so PaceVIO is built to make non-use visible fast. If a manager isn't sending recognition or opening their digest, that shows up in week one, not month six — you'll know whether it's working long before you've paid for a full year.

The design principle is visibility without surveillance. Employees see their own growth path and the recognition they've received — never a private score or a monitoring layer. Pulse responses are anonymous by default. Nothing about the employee experience feels like a compliance tool, because it isn't one.

No. That's the point. PaceVIO has no HR jargon, no performance-improvement-plan workflows, no compliance module. It's built to be operated by a founder or a manager directly — the same person already doing this work today, just with a system behind them instead of relying on memory.

Your company's data is isolated by tenant and never shared across companies. If you cancel, your data remains exportable for a reasonable window before deletion — you're never locked out of your own recognition history or growth records.

The AI drafts; it never sends. Every recognition, digest, and summary requires manager review before it goes anywhere — public board, Slack, or email. The manager owns the final word every time, which is also why the tone stays theirs, not a chatbot's.

No. Pricing is flat per company, by employee-count tier, not per seat. Hiring five people this quarter doesn't raise your bill until you cross into the next tier. That's a deliberate stance against how Lattice, 15Five, and Culture Amp price — per-seat pricing punishes the exact growth you're trying to support.

You move up a tier — Starter to Growth to Scale — at the point your headcount crosses the line, not before. Above 100 employees, Enterprise is a conversation, not a forced jump to a generic "call sales" price.

Month-to-month, cancel anytime. The 14-day trial requires no credit card. If PaceVIO isn't earning its place in your stack, there's no reason to make it hard to leave.
For investors

The thesis, in one page

The gap

Companies with 20–100 employees are too big for founder-led culture and too small for enterprise HR platforms. Enterprise vendors' minimums start at our maximum; mid-market platforms (Lattice, 15Five, Culture Amp) have spent five years creeping upmarket, leaving this segment underserved.

Why now

AI makes it economically viable to give every manager a coach — drafted messages, summarized pulses, generated digests — at a price point a 40-person company can actually pay. That wasn't true five years ago.

The moat

Milestone-triggered prompts, the 14-day recognition-gap alert, and action-first AI (it writes the message, not a chart) don't exist in combination anywhere in the competitive set today. Flat per-company pricing is a structural bet against the per-seat model every incumbent depends on.

The business model

Flat SaaS pricing across three self-serve tiers ($199/$349/$599 per month) plus a sales-assisted Enterprise tier, 14-day free trial with no credit card, manager-activation as the key trial-to-paid predictor. No free tier, by design — this is positioned as infrastructure, not a perk.

The next employee you lose costs more than a year of PaceVIO.

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