EPMA

10/08/2026

46% of enterprises are managing 6 or more external workforce vendors. 17% are managing 10 or more.

Almost none of them designed it that way.

The current workforce model at most organizations was not designed. It accumulated. One urgent requisition, one specialized initiative, one regional expansion at a time. And the costs of that accumulation are showing up in places most executives are not measuring: administrative drag at the hiring manager level, rate confusion across comparable roles, context loss (because no vendor knows you deeply), compliance exposure spread across 10+ relationships.

The MSP response consolidates vendor management but often introduces different problems: a race-to-submit dynamic that produces quantity over quality, a barrier between hiring managers and vendors, and a margin-dictation problem that breaks specialist economics.

The answer is not fewer vendors in total. It is the right few per category.

Full breakdown of why vendor sprawl happens, what it costs, and what a designed workforce model actually looks like -

46% of enterprises manage six or more workforce vendors. The hidden costs of vendor sprawl, why MSPs often make it worse, and what a designed model looks like.

10/06/2026

43% of mid-market leaders say efficiency gains from cost-cutting have hit their limit.
Only 12% still name cost reduction as a top priority. 47% have moved on to prioritizing top-line growth.
So where does the next efficiency gain actually come from? Most mid-market operations answer by buying another tool. Capital One's 2026 research found them spending $2 on technology for every $1 on employee training. The assumption underneath: tools will produce the efficiency that cost-cutting cannot.
That assumption is usually wrong.
Seven places where mid-market operations are either producing operating leverage right now or quietly losing it: planning quality, portfolio discipline, client communication, tool utilization, decision velocity, governance, and meeting discipline. None of them have a vendor pushing them. All of them cost less and compound more than the next SaaS line item.
Read more here 👉 https://blog.epmainc.com/delivery-ex*****on-mid-market.../

43% of mid-market leaders have hit the cost-cutting wall. The next efficiency gain is in delivery ex*****on, not more tools. Seven places it hides.

10/02/2026

Five times on the Inc. 5000.

The 2026 list ranks EPMA at No. 1969 with 174% three-year revenue growth.

And honestly, the number that matters most to us isn't the ranking. It's the five. Making this list once takes a specific set of conditions to align. Making it five times says something different about how a firm is being built.

Sustained growth in professional services is not an accident. It is the compounding effect of relationships, discipline, and a willingness to say no to work that doesn't fit.

To the clients whose partnership has made this recognition possible, and to the team whose work has earned it, thank you. There is more to build.

Check out the announcement here 👉 https://blog.epmainc.com/epma-inc-5000-2026-no-1969/

EPMA ranks No. 1969 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 with 174% three-year revenue growth, its fifth appearance on the list. What five appearances actually took.

10/01/2026

Are you really taking a cautious approach to hiring or are you acting reactively?

72% of leaders report skills gaps on their teams. 65% are actively paying above their planned salary range to secure candidates with scarce skills.

That's not cautious hiring. Cautious hiring is disciplined, patient, and planned. What's actually happening is desperate, reactive, and premium-priced. And the salary premium is the smallest cost.

The real costs: internal equity issues, higher turnover on rushed hires, consulting and vendor spend to backfill the gap, and an underlying workforce planning problem that never gets solved.

Why companies keep telling themselves they're being cautious when the data shows they're being reactive.

Read the article here 👉 https://blog.epmainc.com/reactive-hiring/

Companies paying above plan for scarce skills are not being cautious. What reactive hiring costs, and what proactive workforce planning looks like.

09/29/2026

Research across tens of thousands of large projects shows the average budget overrun is well over 70%. Only about a third of projects finish on time, on budget, and with full scope. And these aren't cases of companies skipping the planning phase. Everybody plans. The failures come from HOW planning gets done.

Five patterns keep showing up across technology, engineering, manufacturing, and cross-functional programs: compressed timelines, missing ex*****on-level input, no lessons-learned integration, unmanaged cross-functional seams, undocumented assumptions between groups.

Each one is fixable. None of them get named as the actual cause.

Read more here 👉 https://blog.epmainc.com/project-planning-mistakes/

Projects rarely fail because planning was skipped. Five project planning mistakes that turn signed-off plans into overruns, and what to do instead.

09/25/2026

Straight Talk from EPMA, week 4.

Back to Kaly this week. Question: what do executives running project-driven operations most underestimate about their own business?

A: There are four types of debt most organizations are carrying. And often times, only one is ever talked about.

Most understand technical debt. They know that choosing short-term software fixes over integrated long-term design creates a bill that comes due later. What they don't see is that they're carrying three other kinds of debt at the same time. And together the four compound in ways that determine how well the organization executes.

Technical debt. Tools bought in different eras for different problems. Systems that don't talk to each other. Short-term fixes layered on short-term fixes. Every year the administrative overhead grows because nobody has funded the integrated solution the operation actually needs.

Process debt. Approval chains built for a different scale. Reporting cadences set by a different leadership team. Governance layers added after incidents nobody remembers. Each one made sense when it was created. None of them get questioned. Together they consume a meaningful percentage of your organization's productive capacity.

People debt. Doing more with less can work. Doing it without discipline can't. Lean teams succeed with crystal-clear priorities and methodical ways of working. Without those, half your team's productive time gets consumed switching contexts, and high-priority work falls through the cracks. You're paying for capacity you never actually get.

Alignment debt. The missing golden thread through the organization. Executives are constantly driving change. New strategies, new priorities, new initiatives. Real change management is what carries the why of that change all the way down through the organization so everyone at every level understands the reason behind it, how their piece contributes, and how it benefits them personally. When that golden thread is missing, people execute tasks without understanding why. They stay because it's safer than leaving. But they've checked out of the work. That's the direct line between alignment debt and what everyone is calling job hugging.

None of these show up on your balance sheet, yet all of them accrue interest. Any of these surprise you or make you think about it in a different light?

What would you want one of our leaders to answer honestly? Drop your questions in the comments.

09/23/2026

Workers aren't settled in 2026.

They're trapped.

Search intent collapsed from 93% of workers planning to search in 2025 to 43% in 2026. On paper, hiring managers finally have the leverage back they lost in 2021. In practice, the workers who won't search are also the ones drawing the hardest lines they've ever drawn on employer terms.

That combination looks captive and behaves rigidly. And it's costing hiring managers the specific candidates they actually want.

Here's the hiring paradox of 2026, and what to do about it.

https://blog.epmainc.com/2026-labor-market-hiring-paradox/

Fewer workers are job searching, but the 2026 labor market is not a buyer’s market. Why trapped workers are harder to hire, and what to do about it.

09/21/2026

The narrative you've been hearing about mid-market AI is that adoption is behind.

The data says otherwise.

51% of mid-market companies report improved business insights from AI, ahead of larger peers. Adoption is happening. What's missing is the governance, integration, and measurement infrastructure that turns adoption into defensible value.

Only 14% of mid-market firms have a formal AI strategy. 70% say at least half their applications aren't AI-ready. Fewer than a third of decision-makers can tie AI investment to financial results.

That's not an AI problem. It's a proof problem. And CFOs have noticed.

Read the article 👉 https://blog.epmainc.com/measuring-ai-roi-mid-market/

Mid-market AI adoption is strong but defensible value is not. Why measuring AI ROI keeps failing, and what separates AI spend that survives scrutiny.

09/18/2026

Straight Talk from EPMA, week 3.

This week we hand the mic to Parthiv Bhuta, Vice President at EPMA. Parthiv spends his days inside the PM platforms our clients depend on, which means he hears the same complaints over and over.

Q: What's the one thing you hear PMs complain about with their tools?

A: Most PMs complain that their tools feel like doing a second job, an administrative burden rather than a system that helps them.

They feel the UI isn't designed the way they actually work. Or that different systems don't talk to each other, so they have to enter the same information twice. A common example is entering financial information in the financial tool and then again in the PM tool so they can forecast correctly.

Then there's the classic. Having to build a separate PowerPoint presentation every week for status reporting instead of being able to pull directly from the PM tool their team already uses.

👀What would you want one of our leaders to answer honestly? Drop your questions in the comments.

09/16/2026

Hiring feels harder than ever in 2026.
The natural assumption is talent shortage.
The actual problem is that your process contradicts your own stated urgency.

Job postings are drawing 50% more applications than they were 18 months ago. Qualified candidates aren't scarce. Their patience is. And most companies are burning through it in three specific ways they don't even realize.

Here's exactly what's happening in your hiring process.

Read the full blog here 👉 https://blog.epmainc.com/your-hiring-bottleneck-isnt-candidate-supply/

Hiring feels harder in 2026, but candidate supply isn’t the problem. Your process is. Where mid-market hiring actually breaks down, and how to fix it.