Workforce Optics · Proven Group LLC

Seeing the workforce value others measure past

Proven Group applies sabermetric-style analytics to workforce performance — surfacing the metrics that predict long-term organizational value, with particular precision for experienced workers whose contributions rarely appear on a standard performance review.

1 in 4
Colorado residents over 60 by 2050
The workforce is changing faster than the measurement systems designed to evaluate it.
9.6 yrs
Median tenure, workers 55–64
vs. 2.7 years for workers 25–34. The retention advantage is rarely measured or rewarded. — BLS 2024
7
Workforce Optics metrics
Each one surfaces a category of value that standard performance reviews consistently overlook.

Workforce Optics: Seven metrics that change what you see

Just as sabermetrics replaced batting average with on-base percentage, Workforce Optics replaces conventional performance metrics with measures that actually predict organizational value — for workers of any age, with particular insight for experienced employees.

ESR
Error Severity Ratio
Measures how the cost of mistakes decreases as a function of experience. A veteran's rare, low-severity errors look very different from a new hire's frequent, costly ones.
Academically validated
TAP
Tenure-Adjusted Productivity
The ROI of keeping vs. replacing. Grounded in Nobel Prize-winning Human Capital Theory. The math almost always surprises organizations that run it for the first time.
Academically validated
CER
Compensation Efficiency Ratio
Are you getting more value than you're paying for? For experienced workers, the answer is frequently yes — by a significant margin that no one has calculated.
Academically validated
CRE
Crisis Response Effectiveness
What happens when normal procedures fail? Regulation knowledge, decision quality, and resolution speed — the judgment call metrics that experienced workers carry.
Validation study in development
IKV
Institutional Knowledge Value
What walks out the door when they leave. The undocumented processes, informal relationships, and organizational memory that exists only in one person's head.
Academically validated
R&C
Reliability & Consistency
The person you never have to worry about. Attendance, deadline adherence, and output consistency — dependability has an economic value that almost no organization calculates.
Academically validated
MKT
Mentoring & Knowledge Transfer
Are experienced workers making everyone around them better? The multiplier effect — people trained × skill adoption × trainee retention — measured as organizational ROI.
Validation study in development

Policy made practical. Performance made visible.

"The government can't do all this work. Nonprofits can't do all this work. We need the business community involved."

Proven Group translates the dense policy landscape of senior employment — state aging initiatives, workforce development funding, federal program requirements — into decisions that employers, workforce boards, and regional organizations can act on today. Our Workforce Optics framework applies the same data-driven logic that transformed professional sports scouting to the workforce challenge that is reshaping the Mountain West economy.

Matthew Lewis · Founder, Proven Group LLC

For two decades, Matt Lewis helped institutions make complex decisions simple. School districts. Hospital systems. Tribal workforce coalitions. Rural employers across the Southwest. The skill was never the finance — it was translation: taking something that looked like a wall of regulation and finding the door.

In 2018, he turned that same ability toward one of the most misread workforce challenges in the country: an aging workforce that organizations do not know how to value, and a policy landscape that no one had made readable for the employers who needed it most.

Based in Trinidad, Colorado, Matt built Workforce Optics from the ground up — drawing on applied research in rural workforce participation, aging demographics, and the sabermetric methodology that transformed how professional sports evaluates talent.

His FINRA Series 65 license requires fiduciary responsibility — he is legally and professionally obligated to put the client's interests first. His Series 24 supervisory principal credential means he has enforced performance measurement compliance across hundreds of offices. Both inform how Workforce Optics is designed: to protect the organization and the worker, not to rationalize predetermined conclusions.

FINRA Series 24 — General Securities Principal
Supervisory and compliance oversight across financial services operations
FINRA Series 65 — Investment Advisor Representative
Fiduciary responsibility — legally required to act in the client's best interest
20+ years institutional market development
New Mexico, Arizona, West Texas — school districts, hospital systems, municipalities
Applied research since 2018
Rural workforce participation, aging populations, and regional service delivery challenges
Trinidad, Colorado
Rooted in rural Southern Colorado — the communities Workforce Optics is designed to serve

Start a conversation

If you work in workforce development, senior services, regional economic development, or HR — and you've been watching the same workforce challenge without a good way to measure it — we should talk. No obligation, no pitch. Just a conversation about what you're seeing and whether Workforce Optics might help you see it more clearly.

LocationTrinidad, Colorado