June 11 2026
Billy Beane Had Moneyball. He Was Still Losing.
And how this became the blueprint for the metric we just baked into theWorkbook.
By Susan Fox, Founder and CEO, theWorkbook
Most people who watched Moneyball walked away with one lesson: Billy Beane bet on an overlooked number, on-base percentage, that nobody else was paying attention to, and that number won him the season.
But that’s only half of it.
Billy Beane trusted the number. He put a team on the field with it. Then the team struggled until something changed. The metric was the easy part. The real magic was including the team.
Billy Beane didn’t start winning until he brought the players into the conversation. Until they saw the data he was seeing. Until they understood why they were being asked to play differently.
The moment the team was on the same page, the Oakland A’s went on a historic 20-game winning streak. That’s the part that doesn’t make the movie poster. But it’s the part that wins.
“On. The. Same. Page.”
How this applies to our industry
For over 25 years at theWorkbook, we’ve watched the same dynamic play out between agents and the actors they represent. Agents work with information they don’t always share with talent, and often for good reason. The platform respects that. Talent works hard in classes, with coaches, on self-tapes, and rarely sees the data behind whether their work is landing. Two people on the same team, trying to win the same game, working off two different sets of information.
We decided to fix that. We baked the data into the daily workflow software. Both sides. Last year an agent friend, Christopher Bennett, asked me if I could produce a self-tape ratio for the agency. We loved it and we did. The thing is, an audition includes in-person auditions, virtual auditions and self- tape auditions.
Later, when we sat down to figure out which single number defines our industry’s business, we kept coming back to the same one: the conversion of submissions to audition requests. In baseball terms, getting on base isn’t a run, but you can’t score unless you get on base. In casting terms: getting an audition is the parking lot. You don’t book without it.
That number has a name now. The Audition Ratio.
But the number alone wasn’t enough.
Just like in Moneyball. So, we built the Audition Ratio into a coaching loop and put it inside both sides of the relationship. The agent sees the conversion picture across the roster. The talent sees the discoverability picture for themselves. Both see the same field from two angles. Both work from the same data.
What the loop looks like for talent
For every actor on the platform, with or without representation, every screen ends in a next move. Here’s what that looks like:
- RESULT: Your profile appeared in 20 casting director searches this week.
- INSIGHT: 37% of those casting directors searched for skills. You listed none.
- ACTION: Add your skills.
The action links straight back into the platform. The talent makes the change, then re-measures tomorrow. Small, incremental, compounding growth. And the agent’s view updates the moment the talent makes the move. That’s what we built. Two roles, one playbook.
What we did not build, and why it matters just as much
There are a lot of platforms with data on actors and agents. Most of them use that data to enrich themselves. They scrape it. They package it. They sell it back to the industry.
“Disruptors enrich themselves. We enrich our clients.”
We made a different choice. We built the data to enrich the people who generate it. The agents, the managers, the casting directors, the producers, the talent. So they can win with us. Not the other way around.
This is what really matters. Not the metric itself. Not the dashboard. The fact that the metric and the data live with the people doing the work, and that those two people, the agent and the talent, finally see the same field, on the same page, with the same playbook, for the first time in our industry’s history.
“Information without sharing it with both sides isn’t insight. It’s hoarding.”
That distinction is what theWorkbook has always been about. Built by the industry, for the industry. Serving casting directors, agents, managers, producers, and talent in 65 countries for over 25 years, now employee-owned, with a single mandate: serve the industry.
Today we’re giving every member a tool they can use to win.
The metric is here.
The team is now on the same page.
Susan Fox is the Founder and CEO of theWorkbook, the trusted media and casting platform serving the global industry for over 25 years. Roster Performance and myPerformance, the dashboards built around the Audition Ratio, are available today for every theWorkbook member worldwide.
Read The Full Press Release Here
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