Case Studies
A manufacturer sold a year of growth into six months and was hiring five people for every one who stayed. A written training path, priced to $30 an hour and handed over on day one, cut it to 1.5 and closed a $55K training leak.
Sales sold a year of growth into six months. HR was hiring five people for every one who would stay.
Hiring ran through agencies. People showed up keen, were on the floor ten minutes later learning from whoever stood next to them, and at the end of the day decided whether to come back.
None of it looked like a hiring problem. It arrived as missed output, and the first explanation for that is always that the growth came too fast.
5:1
Hires for every one who stayed past thirty days. Each dot is one hire, filled dots are the keepers. Nobody had run this arithmetic, so nobody knew the growth plan was already dead.
The intake, not the order book, is what sets how fast a business can grow.
Twenty hours of training walked out the door with every three-week hire. A first-day walkout costs two or three hours. Someone who lasts three weeks absorbs close to twenty hours of a supervisor's time, and then the station goes back to square one.
20 hrs
Training absorbed by every hire who lasted three weeks, gone the moment they left. A first-day walkout costs two or three.
The cost of a hire is not the wage. It is the supervisor time you spend twice.
We went through the business one layer at a time. Station, facilities, how information moved, what was documented, training, supervision, oversight. Every layer was asked the same question: does this tell a new person they are being invested in, or not?
Most of the answers were cheap to change. General labour became a trade with levels, the levels were priced, and the path was handed over before anyone committed to the job.
$30
The top of the ladder, written down and handed over before anyone commits to the job. A path the business can show beats a raise it cannot repeat.
The wage moves are small. Knowing they exist is what changes the decision at the end of day one.
Production improved alongside the hiring numbers. What made someone want to stay also made them quicker at the station, because most of what was missing was training and documentation.
People could see their own objectives inside the company's. The ladder told them what skill came next and what it paid, the training told them how to get it, and the floor told them money was being spent on them before anything was asked back. High standards, high accountability, high support. Most places install the first two and stop, and the third is what makes them land.
1.5:1
Five showing up for one who stayed became one showing up with two more on the referral list. The $55,000 training leak closed with it.
150 hires that no longer had to be made, for $10,000 and a written program.
"We cannot grow that fast" is almost always a statement about your own system, not your market. Get the cost of a hire wrong and you pay twice, in time and in money. Scaling means the whole business is ready to grow at the rate you designed, and the risk is losing the momentum you worked so hard to create.