Salary is the smallest part of the number

Most firms budget a business development hire at the salary line. At the numbers below, salary is about two-thirds of what the first year actually costs — and it is the only part most firms plan for. The rest is payroll burden, the months the role is paid before it produces, what it costs to find the person, and the real possibility that the hire does not work out and the whole cycle repeats.

None of that is an argument against hiring. It is an argument for knowing the number before you commit to it. Change the inputs below to match what you would actually offer.

Your numbers

Target base salary

What you would offer, before anything else.

Expected ramp

months

Months before the role is producing, not learning.

Payroll burden

Taxes, benefits, insurance, equipment, software.

Recruiting cost

Agency fee, job boards, or your own time to hire.

Turnover risk

Odds this hire does not last the first year.

Fully-loaded first year

—

What the first year of this role costs, all in.

Base salary—

Payroll burden—

Recruiting—

Expected turnover cost—

First-year total—

Growth Partnership

$2,500/month · $30,000 a year

—

in year one

What the Growth Partnership includes →

Accelerator Partnership

$3,500/month · $42,000 a year

—

in year one

What the Accelerator Partnership includes →

This compares cost, not capability. A full-time hire is full-time capacity and a retainer is not. The comparison is worth making because the two are routinely considered as alternatives for the same problem — not because they are the same thing.

Get the written read on your numbers

The numbers above are yours to keep. If you want the interpretation — what your ramp and turnover assumptions imply, and the three questions worth answering before you post the job — leave your details and it unlocks here. Colin also reads the numbers you entered and sends a short written Growth Signal Audit — a one-page read on your situation.

The other half of the question

Cost tells you what a hire would take. It does not tell you what a hire would land in — and a business development manager dropped into a business with no pipeline, no follow-up process, and no way to measure results tends to spend the first year building those instead of selling. The scorecard takes about five minutes and tells you which of those exist today.

Take the Growth Scorecard →

Prefer to talk it through instead? A discovery call is 30 minutes and includes an honest answer about fit — including when hiring is the better move.

Book a Discovery Call

How the number is calculated

Nothing here is proprietary. The method is written out so you can argue with it, or rebuild it in a spreadsheet of your own.

Loaded annual cost: Base salary plus payroll burden. Burden covers employer taxes, benefits, insurance, equipment, and software. Twenty to thirty percent is the usual range for a salaried role at a small firm.
Ramp: The months the role is paid while learning your market, your service, and your buyers rather than producing. Six months is common for business development; in long-cycle technical sales it is often longer. Ramp is not an extra cost on top of salary — it is the share of the salary you spend before the role returns anything.
Recruiting: Agency fee, job board spend, or the value of the time you spend hiring. Contingency recruiters typically charge fifteen to twenty-five percent of first-year salary.
Expected turnover cost: Turnover risk applied to what a restart would cost — recruiting again, plus ramping again. It is an expected value, not a prediction: at a twenty-five percent risk you are not losing a quarter of a person, you are carrying a quarter of the cost of doing this twice.
First-year total: Loaded annual cost, plus recruiting, plus expected turnover cost.

What a business development hire actually costs