What a business development hire actually costs
This calculator works out the fully-loaded first-year cost of hiring a business development manager — salary, payroll burden, ramp time, recruiting, and turnover risk — and puts that number next to a $2,500 and $3,500 monthly retainer.
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
What you would offer, before anything else.
Months before the role is producing, not learning.
Taxes, benefits, insurance, equipment, software.
Agency fee, job boards, or your own time to hire.
Odds this hire does not last the first year.
Growth Partnership
Accelerator Partnership
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.
Your written read
What happens next. Colin sends a one-page written Growth Signal Audit — a read on whether the gap in front of you is a person or a system, and what to do about it either way. If hiring is genuinely the right call for your situation, that is what it will say.
It arrives within one business day. No sequence, no follow-up campaign.
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 CallHow 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.