Jay Roland’s mission to fix corporate America’s hidden technical debt

Corporate America is quietly bleeding billions through outdated and inefficient IT processes, and Jay Roland, founder of Varex Solutions, argues that most business leaders are simply ignoring the problem. The scale of this hidden drain, known as technical debt,the cumulative cost of deferred fixes, misconfigurations, and operational waste,is projected to cost U.S. enterprises a staggering $2.41 trillion annually, with an estimated $1.52 trillion required just to fix it. Despite these alarming figures, Roland insists that awareness across the corporate landscape remains dangerously low.

“The numbers projected only tell part of the story,” he says. “The struggles companies are going through are far greater than any figure on a slide. I’ve walked into organizations spending $251 million a year on IT and found $51 million of it being wasted, year over year, on problems they didn’t even know existed.”

To confront this systemic inefficiency, Roland launched Varex Solutions, a Nashville-based consulting firm that targets the critical gap between what enterprises think their IT costs and what it actually costs them. The company offers a comprehensive suite of services, including ITSM platform implementations, maturity assessments, health optimization, and SLA practice guidance. At the heart of Varex’s approach is a commitment to uncovering bottlenecks, technical debt, misconfigurations, and workflow inefficiencies, then converting those discoveries into actionable improvements that directly boost ROI.

The cornerstone of this process is Varex’s proprietary technical debt calculator. Remarkably, the tool requires just three inputs from a client: industry, employee headcount, and annual revenue. From these data points, Roland’s algorithm,built on years of archetypal industrial modeling,autofills an entire financial landscape. The output delivers a cohesive analysis of expenditure, wasted resources, recommended action steps, and projected return on investment.

Roland emphasizes, “There’s no AI involved in this entire process. This is all algorithmically structured technical debt assessments. There’s no point in telling someone they’re wasting money unless you can show them how to stop. Otherwise, it’s just noise. When I give you a number, I can show you exactly how I arrived at it, and your own IT team can verify it.”

Roland’s path to founding Varex was anything but conventional. In November 1999, he tagged along with a friend to a local internet service provider in Pontiac, Michigan, intending to play video games on the T3 line. A broken computer was placed on his desk, and he started fixing it. “Ten minutes later, a manager walked by, glanced at the screen, and told me they’d put me on the payroll,” he recalls. “That was my entry into IT.”

That resourcefulness carried him through the dot-com crash, a co-founded tech support subscription startup, and a chapter advancing a popular role-playing game where he honed the spreadsheet modeling skills that would eventually power Varex. Roland identifies this as his defining professional trait.

“No matter what I do, I bring everything with me,” he says. “What started as projective analysis on character leveling in a Dungeons and Dragons-style game converted into using a spreadsheet software to optimize a quoting process, and eventually into the algorithms behind Varex Solutions. You never know when you’re going to need it.”

Growing up without inherited privilege, Roland frames his modest beginnings as the source of his refusal to accept inefficiency as simply the cost of doing business. “The same water that boils the egg softens the potato,” he says. “Different people react differently to the same circumstances. It was sheer will and determination that got me here, to make something, to give my children something.”

Rather than delivering abstract consulting promises in boardrooms, Roland insists on handing executives a specific, verified number. “I show them: this is what you’re wasting, this is the proof, and this is how to fix it,” he explains. The calculator was built to close the distance between vague projections and hard accountability.

The resistance he often encounters reveals a deeper corporate reluctance. “I once asked a CIO if I could help uncover $25 to $40 million a year in unnecessary IT spend,” he recalls. “But the response I received was one of indifference.” Roland believes this dynamic exists because uncovering decades of avoidable waste is a conversation most executives would prefer never to have. “Would you want to tell your CFO that you have been wasting tens of millions of dollars annually for all these years?” he asks.

The central question Roland keeps returning to is direct: how bad does a problem have to get before the people responsible for it decide it’s actually a problem? How many misconfigurations have to stack up before the cumulative damage becomes unsustainable? That is the conversation Varex Solutions exists to propel forward, and on Roland’s timeline, it is already overdue.