The Executive One-Pager

1. The cost of the problem

Turnover is a number, not a feeling.

Compiled industry research puts the cost of replacing a single employee at $10,000 to $50,000, a conservative range covering recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and the ramp before a replacement is fully productive. For a more senior or specialized person the fully loaded cost climbs higher: take a $75,000 salary at the commonly cited three to four times multiple and a single departure can reach roughly $225,000 once lost output and disruption are counted.

Put your own headcount and turnover rate against those figures and the annual bleed becomes a concrete number a CFO can compare against the cost of fixing it.

2. The shape of the fix

A system, not a slogan.

Most of that loss is avoidable, because people rarely leave without a window in which someone could have acted. The fix is a deliberate retention practice: spot the early signal, equip managers to hold the right conversation in time, and close the loop to confirm it worked, run as a program with a cadence and clear owners rather than left to chance. The discipline is well understood and most of it can begin without new spend. The hard part is sustaining it consistently, for everyone, at scale.

3. The ask

Fund it, sponsor it, hold the line.

This is not a request for sympathy for a soft issue. It is a request to protect the most expensive and least understood asset on the balance sheet. Three things make it real: fund the system that supports managers, sponsor it visibly so the organization treats it as serious, and hold managers accountable for the behaviors that keep good people. Framed that way, retention stops being a cost the company tolerates and becomes a margin it protects.