You Don't Have a Hiring Problem. You Have a Development Problem.
Most leaders can tell you their revenue number. Their margin. Their pipeline.
Ask them what it costs to lose a good employee, and you'll get a shrug.
Not because they don't care. Because nobody ever handed them the number.
The real gap
Here's what I see walking into growth-stage and PE-backed companies, over and over: the people aren't the problem. The infrastructure around them is.
Managers get promoted for tenure, not readiness. Technically brilliant people get handed a team and zero instruction on how to lead one. And the gap between what your people are capable of and what they're actually delivering doesn't show up on a line item labeled "leadership." It shows up in turnover. In missed goals. In the slow culture drift that's hard to name but everyone in the building can feel.
That gap has a cost. Most companies just never see it in writing.
Why I built two free tools
I got tired of telling people what turnover costs and started building something that shows them instead.
The Manager Effectiveness Scorecard — eight questions that tell you how ready your managers actually are to lead, not how long they've sat in the seat.
What It Costs You To Lose Them — plug in one role and one salary, and see the real number: what you've already lost, and what you're still exposed to. No sales call. No form to fill out first. Just the math.
And the math isn't guessed at. It's built on replacement-cost benchmarks from Gallup and SHRM, broken into the actual categories that make it up — recruiting, onboarding, the productivity hole while the seat sits empty, the ramp-up time once someone new is in it. You can see exactly where every dollar comes from, because a number you can't defend isn't worth much to a CFO or a founder deciding where to spend next quarter.
What this is actually for:
I'm not interested in scaring anyone with a big scary number for its own sake. I'm interested in the decision that comes after it.
Once you can see what it costs to lose someone, the math almost always favors developing them instead — before they quiet quit, before they walk, before you're back in the hiring cycle paying for it twice.
That's the whole case. Not a philosophy. A number you can run yourself, in about two minutes.
Try it
Both tools are live and free on the site — no strings attached:
Manager Effectiveness Scorecard — see where your leadership bench actually stands
What It Costs You To Lose Them — run the number on one role right now
Run them on your own team. If the number surprises you, that's usually the conversation worth having next.
Comments