Edition one · Staffing
150 US staffing firms between $100M and $1B, scored against one instrument. Every score published with the verbatim text it came from.
Status — August 2026
Scoring runs October. Publication November 2026.
The methodology below was written and dated before any company was scored, and it will be published unchanged next to the results. That is the whole point of putting it here now — a study design you can only read after you have seen the findings is not a study design.
Five things about each company's homepage, using the instrument on the model page:
The claim it exists to test: in most B2B categories, two of the three available positions are crowded and the third is empty.
Because the frame is real. Staffing Industry Analysts publishes an annual revenue ranking of US firms, and 214 of them cleared $100M in 2025. One source, one ranking, segment breakouts included — which means every company in the sample was chosen by a number somebody else published, not by anyone's judgment about who counts.
Three other categories were considered and dropped. Healthcare IT, vertical software and industrial technology have no authoritative public revenue ranking in that band. Assembling a sample from mixed sources would have made every comparison in the Index arguable.
Later editions add a category each time. Logistics has a ranking. Benefits administration has a ranking. Those are next.
Where any reasonable reading has a message naming a buyer's situation, it gets coded Negative Present — even when a stricter reading wouldn't. That inflates the one category the Index expects to find empty, on purpose. A strict rule would manufacture the result. If the number is still near zero under a rule built to break it, it holds.
Every company Dean Waye or WayeCreative has ever done paid work for is out of the sample, replaced by the next firm down the revenue rank. The person publishing this sells a service premised on its conclusion. That is a reason to build in the exclusions, not to pretend the interest isn't there.
Not "above the fold" — the fold moves with the viewport. The unit is the dominant headline plus the first line of copy beneath it, captured verbatim before scoring. Every published score links to the text it came from.
All 150 companies, named, with their text, their five scores and the capture date. Marketing research normally ships a conclusion and withholds the evidence, which is exactly why nobody believes any of it.
The data set goes live with publication in November.
You don't have to wait for the Index to run the instrument on your own page. It takes three minutes and produces the same number.