When the referral pipeline stalls, the reflex is a job ad. Sometimes that's right. But the comparison most providers run — advertised salary versus install fee — is not the real comparison, and the gap between the two is where the money goes.
The full cost of the hire
Run these five lines with your own figures — every one of them is knowable from your own books or a current job board:
- Salary — what the market is actually asking this quarter, not last year's number.
- On-costs — super, leave loading, workers comp, payroll tax where it applies. Your accountant can give you the loaded multiple in one email.
- Ramp — months before a new coordinator's outreach produces placements. Count what you paid for output during that ramp.
- Management — someone senior now supervises this person. Hours per week, at that person's rate.
- Churn risk — if they leave inside two years, lines 1–4 restart, and the relationships they held go with them unless a system captured them.
The full cost of the system
- Install fee — flat, in writing, on the diagnostic call.
- Retainer — monthly, covering monitoring, adjustment and error handling.
- Your team's residual work — the conversations themselves. The system runs contact, cadence and reply detection; humans still do the talking, because coordinators refer to people.
What the comparison misses in both directions
Against the hire: a person does things no agent does — builds real relationships, attends the expo, hears the thing nobody wrote down. If your pipeline problem is relationship depth, hire.
Against the system: an agent doesn't call in sick, doesn't ramp, doesn't take the database with it when it resigns — and the coordinator database it builds is yours to keep. If your pipeline problem is volume and consistency, that's a systems problem, and hiring a person to be a system is the expensive way to lose.
A stalled pipeline can be a relationship-depth problem, a demand problem in your areas, or a volume-and-consistency problem wearing a headcount costume — and the right spend is different for each. The diagnostic exists to tell which one yours is, in your numbers.
The written terms
For the Referral Agent install, the guarantee is in writing: a coordinator books a conversation within 90 days, or a full refund of the install fee. You keep the coordinator database and templates regardless of outcome.
Run it
Bring your five hire-cost lines to the free Operational Diagnostic — 30 minutes, and the recommendation is written, either way. If the honest answer is "hire," you'll leave with that in writing too.