Most owners can tell you to the penny what it costs to build a job. Almost none can tell you what it costs to land one real sit-down with a new customer.
That’s a strange gap, because a real sit-down is the first thing you actually buy when you spend money chasing new work. Everything before it — tools, salaries, retainers — is just the invoice. Everything after it is your sales guys’ job.
So let’s run the math nobody runs. There are three ways to get more new work coming in the door right now, and they price out very differently once you divide what you spent by what it produced.
Option 1: Put someone on payroll to run it
The going rate for someone who can build and run this in-house is $135K+ in base salary. Add benefits, tools, and the time it takes them to get up to speed, and the real first-year number climbs from there.
One more number before you write the job description: half the people who do this work are under 26. No knock on them. But you’re paying a senior wage for a job so new that most of the people holding it have never been on the hook for a sales number through a full year — never mind a bad one.
And it’s all riding on one person. In a market this hot for the skill, they’ll get poached. When they go, it all goes with them — it’s in their head, their logins, the little scripts they wrote on the side. You didn’t buy a system. You rented a person.
The division: $135K+ a year, divided by however many real sit-downs actually happened. Most owners making this hire never do that division. Do it before you write the offer letter.
Option 2: Rent an agency
The standard agency retainer starts around $5K a month. That’s $60K+ a year, every year, forever.
Some agencies are genuinely good. The deal itself is the problem. The day you stop paying, it all stops — and the accounts, the lists, the follow-up they built, everything they learned on your dime, mostly stays on their side of the fence.
Year one, you paid $60K+ for sit-downs. Year three, you’ve paid $180K+ and you own exactly what you owned on day one: nothing. Rent never turns into something you own. That’s what rent means.
The division: $60K+ a year, divided by real sit-downs held — sit-downs your own sales guys would call real, not “positive replies” or “conversations started.” Ask your agency for that number and watch how the conversation goes.
Option 3: Own the system
The third column is the one almost nobody prices, because until recently it wasn’t really an option: a system built on your own setup and owned by your company.
Honest math, because you’ll check it: a Build Your Follow-Up System engagement plus a year of Keep It Running runs $30K–$54K the first year. That overlaps the agency number and comes in well under the hire. It’s a real spend, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
But look at what each dollar buys. The follow-up sits in your system. The records are yours, and everything you learn builds up in something you keep. Year two, you’re not re-signing a $60K retainer or covering a $135K+ salary. You’re keeping up something you own — and it runs for less than my phone bill.
And no, I’m not going to tell you it’s “75% cheaper.” Anybody selling that is playing games with the numbers. Year one, the columns overlap. The real question is rent versus own: one bill disappears the month you stop paying, the other one you keep.
The column we’re filling in next
You’ll notice one number missing from this page: what it costs me to land one real sit-down, from my own system.
That’s on purpose. I don’t put out a number without the screenshot behind it. I run this on my own business first — the same system I’d build for you lands my own sit-downs, and the numbers get published monthly, broken parts included.
The own-it column gets its real number — straight off my own screen — in The Monthly Report #001, publishing August 6. Subscribers to The Shop Floor get it before it goes anywhere else.
Until then, everything above is market math you can check yourself: $135K+ for the hire, $5K+/mo for the agency, $30K–$54K the first year to own it.
Run the division on your own shop
Homework, and it’s uncomfortable: take everything you spent chasing new work last quarter. Salaries, retainers, tools, lists. Divide it by the number of real sit-downs your sales guys actually held.
If you can’t come up with the second number in ten minutes, that’s a finding by itself. If you can, and what each sit-down costs makes you wince, now you know which column you’re really in.
This is the same math a Leak Audit runs on your shop — the whole setup for bringing in new work, priced and scored line by line. If you want it run on yours, with your real numbers, book a Leak Audit.
— Josh