JERK Report #23 Nobody publishes a VIX for business.

Are you discounting to close deals?

Are you measuring how much, or treating each one as a one-off?

My limited informal survey suggests deals are getting harder to close and people are getting flexible on terms. I am having a hard time quantifying it.

I do a mix of qualitative and quantitative JERK reports, but I prefer quantitative. And not just quantitative. Prices are better than behaviors, behaviors are better than surveys, and surveys beat opinions.

The VIX is the price of insurance on the stock market. Wall Street calls it the fear gauge. It is computed from what traders are actually paying for S&P 500 options, and it tracks protection against big moves over the next 30 days. When protection gets expensive, the number rises. Around 15 is calm, above 30 is fear, above 40 is panic.

It is a forecast you can trust because everyone contributing to it is betting.

For years I ignored the VIX readings on Bloomberg radio, thinking they were for traders. They are an interesting concept for businesses too.

The VIX works because thousands of participants are each putting money against the same question. You do not have thousands of participants. You have your money actually at risk.

This report is about trying to quantify those gut instincts you have around demand, credit, and labor. Since your business has skin in the game numbers too, I think the 80/20 might be something like:

• Discount depth to close. List price minus what each customer paid. Weekly or monthly average.

• Vendor terms and number of days to pay. The number of days of "float" that suppliers extend to you, and what customers take from you. Both sit in your AP/AR already. This is your credit market.

• Wage to fill. For your critical roles, what the last hire actually cost against what the role paid a year ago.

Why these three? Demand, credit, labor are critical to every business, each one can be read as a price and the data for each one is already sitting in a system you own.

Then I went looking for the national versions of the same three numbers.

Here is how far down each one let me go.

Discount depth to close: no data at all

I could not find a single public source for discount depth to close at small business scale. Not national, not by state, not by industry. Nobody measures it. People do not even like to talk about it.

The closest public proxy runs the other way. In June, 38% of small business owners reported raising their average selling prices, the highest reading since January 2023 and the fourth straight monthly increase.¹

That is list price. What customers actually paid is the number nobody publishes.

Which means the only dataset on earth for that number is sitting in your own quotes and invoices.

Layers available: none.

Days of float: the level is flat, the direction turned

The average US small business waits 28.8 days to get paid on an invoice, up from 28.3 days the quarter before. Invoices are paid 9.0 days late on average, up from 8.4 days.²

Half a day. Six tenths of a day. As a level, that is flat.

As a direction, it is not. Payment times improved through 2025. That improvement stopped and reversed in the first quarter of 2026. Xero, whose platform transaction data this is, says so in its own commentary.

The survey data points the same way. 59% of small businesses now have invoices overdue by 30 days or more, up from 47% a year ago.³ 42% say outside pressures delayed payments they owed to their own contractors, suppliers, or vendors.³

Your own AR and AP history is still more reliable.

Layers available: two.

Wage to fill: a three-year decline has stopped

The national version of wage to fill is what the market pays a worker to change jobs. All of it is payroll transaction data.⁴

Job changer pay growth peaked at 16.4% in June 2022, fell to about 9% by late 2023, drifted down through the 7s, and bottomed near 6.4% early this year. It was 6.5% last month and 6.6% now.

For three years, the cost of hiring someone away from another employer fell every single year. Owners could hold wages because nobody was being outbid. That has stopped. It has not reversed.

The premium for leaving, the gap between a raise for staying and a raise for jumping, was 7.7 points at the 2022 peak. It compressed to around 2.1 points by 2024 and has held under 3 points for more than two years. ADP's own researchers named that period the Big Stay. It sits at 2.2 points today.

One tick up, a tenth of a point, is not a trend.

Layers available: two.

Why these three, and not the ones on your P&L

These are early indicators for demand, credit, and labor. Every business runs on all three, and each one is already a price sitting in a system you own.

Discount depth tells you what your pricing power actually is, not what you list. It moves before revenue does, because the concession happens at the close and the revenue lands a quarter later.

Float tells you who is financing whom. When your customers stretch and your suppliers tighten in the same month, you are lending money you did not decide to lend.

Wage to fill tells you what a seat costs before you need it. The number moves while the role is still filled.

Discount depth, float and wage to fill move before the number you actually watch moves.

Owners are talking about feeling it is harder to sell than it was, but I am having trouble measuring it. That feeling has two settings, panic and don't look, and neither leads to your best thinking or decision making.

The fourth layer

Four layers. Position, velocity, acceleration, jerk. Where you are. How fast it is moving. Whether the move is speeding up. And whether the rules of the move are changing.

I wanted the fourth layer. I could not get it.

Not for lack of looking. Invoice defaults. Bank delinquency on business loans.⁵ Small business bankruptcy filings. Freight invoices. Producer prices.

Every one of them stopped in the same place.

Jerk needs readings often enough to see a change in a change in a change. It needs precision finer than the moves being measured. And it needs numbers that stay put after they are printed.

The float data is quarterly, and December got restated. The wage data rounds to a tenth of a point and moves a tenth of a point. The delinquency data is quarterly, and its quarterly moves are the size of its own rounding.

You cannot read a third derivative through an instrument that coarse. Not because the signal is missing. Because the instrument cannot resolve it.

So the national numbers will tell you where you are and roughly how fast you are moving.

They will not tell you when the rules change.

That reading has to come from somewhere closer in.

The five-minute practice

Pull your list versus actual price data. Every closed deal for the last quarter. List price in one column, what they actually paid in the other. Subtract. If you have extra time, add a third column for concessions that were not price, and put a dollar figure on those too.

Pull your float from QuickBooks or Xero. A/R Aging for what customers take from you. A/P for what your suppliers extend you.

Pull your wage to fill from payroll. For your key roles, what the last hire cost against what that role paid a year ago. If you have not hired, what the role would cost you today.

Then put all of them on your dashboard and in your regular reviews.

The practice tells you how much you are discounting to win business, whether you are losing money acting as a lender, and if payroll trends are impacting your business.

Congratulations, you now have three series nobody else on earth can see.

Footnotes

1. NFIB Small Business Economic Trends, June 2026 survey, released July 14, 2026. Survey data. https://www.nfib.com/news/monthly_report/sbet/

2. Xero Small Business Insights, United States, platform transaction data. April 2026 release, published 30 April 2026, covering the March 2026 quarter. https://www.xero.com/us/resources/small-business-insights/latest-united-states/

3. Intuit QuickBooks 2026 Small Business Late Payments Report, published July 7, 2026. Survey data, flagged as such. https://quickbooks.intuit.com/r/small-business-data/small-business-late-payments-report-2026/

4. ADP National Employment Report and ADP Pay Insights, June 2026, released July 1, 2026. Payroll transaction data. https://mediacenter.adp.com/2026-07-01-ADP-National-Employment-Report-Private-Sector-Employment-Increased-by-98,000-Jobs-in-June-Annual-Pay-was-Up-4-4

5. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Delinquency Rate on Business Loans, All Commercial Banks (DRBLACBS), Q1 2026. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DRBLACBS

6. Cboe Volatility Index (VIX), daily closes, January 2 to July 20, 2026. Market price data. Chart by Design Rosetta. Data via Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EVIX/history/