What hiring actually costs

The salary number is the smallest part of the bill. By the time a new hire is actually doing the job, you have paid for a lot more than the figure on the offer letter. Here is the real math, and why most owners underprice it by half.

The sticker price is not the price

Take a front desk receptionist. The base salary runs around $38,000 a year. That is the number that goes in the budget. It is not what the seat costs you.

Once you add the costs every employer carries, that $38,000 becomes about $49,400. The rule of thumb is a 1.3x labor burden, and it comes from five places:

• Payroll taxes. CPP, EI, and the employer side of every statutory contribution. Roughly 10 to 12% of salary.
• Benefits. Health, dental, and any retirement matching. Another 8 to 15%.
• Paid time off. Vacation, statutory holidays, and sick days are paid time when no work gets done. About 8% of working days.
• Overhead. A laptop, software seats, a desk or a remote stipend, and the IT and admin to support all of it. Call it 10%.
• Recruiting and onboarding. Job boards or a recruiter, plus the hiring manager hours and the weeks of half output while they ramp.

Stack those on top of base and the receptionist costs you roughly $49,400 a year, not $38,000. A marketing manager at $85,000 base lands closer to $110,500.

The costs that never make the budget

The 1.3x is the part you can put in a spreadsheet. The expensive part is the part you cannot.

Ramp time. The average role takes about 33 days to fill, plus a two week notice period, so you are near 47 days before day one. Then add the weeks it takes a new person to get good. For most of that window you are paying full salary for partial output.

The work that slips. While the seat is empty or ramping, the calls still come in, the quotes still need follow-up, and the reviews still need asking for. They do not get done. Every missed call and dead quote is revenue you already paid to acquire, walking to a competitor.

Management. Someone has to hire, train, correct, and cover for that person. That someone is usually you.

Turnover. When a hire does not work out, you pay the whole bill again. The all-in cost to replace an employee runs from 50% to 200% of their salary.

Now do it eight times

A growing service business does not need one hire. It needs a front desk, someone on marketing, someone on operations, an assistant, a designer for the site and the graphics, and more. The eight roles that keep a customer operation running add up to about $655,900 a year in loaded salary. That is before a single one of them has ramped, and before the first one quits.

You can see your own version of this number on the Team Calculator. Pick the roles you would actually hire, add the employer load, and watch it climb.

The point of the math

We did not write this to talk you out of hiring. We wrote it so the comparison is honest.

The reason Susanoo exists is that you can have the work those eight roles do, every call answered in about 30 seconds, every lead followed up until it books, the calendar filled, the reviews asked for, without carrying $655,900 in salary, without the 47 day ramp, and without managing any of it. That is the Whole-Team Install: one system, run by real people, live in 10 business days, for one published price starting at $2,000 a month.

If you want to see exactly what that would replace in your business, book a Discovery Call. You leave with the numbers either way.