The $800K Problem: Why Your Best Business Developer Can't See Her Own Network

The highest-paid person at a $150M staffing firm spent 90% of her time on calls that went nowhere.

She wasn't bad at her job. She was their best business developer. She just couldn't see her own network.

The Brute-Force Model

Dave Rust, former CFO at Salo (sold to Korn Ferry at $150M), described their top business development director. She made roughly $800K a year. Her method: "She's just constantly calling people. And just looking for nuggets of information."

She had 70 people on billing at peak. She succeeded because she had more conversations than anyone else, and some of them hit.

Dave estimated 90% of her time was "non-value-added" — meetings, coffees, calls that yielded no actual business. The industry accepts this because the 10% that works produces enough to justify the cost.

But accepting a 90% waste rate means you're also accepting that you could double output by going from 90/10 to 80/20.

The Expensive Resource Doing Cheap Work

A $400-800K business developer spends their days doing things that data could do:

• Scanning LinkedIn for signals
• Monitoring job postings
• Checking if former clients moved companies
• Looking for any sign that someone might need staffing services

This is research. Not relationship-building. The relationship-building only happens when they find the right person at the right time — and most of their day is spent trying to find that person.

Revenue Per Person Is the Metric That Matters

Adam from Eighty20 Consulting confirmed what every staffing leader knows: "Every organization has their revenue target per person."

At Salo, it was $4-6M per producer. The question for any tool is simple: can you move that number?

If a business developer covers 70 billings but could cover 90 with better intelligence, the incremental revenue is massive — without adding a single headcount.

Why Firms Can't Scale Past $20M

Joe Myers, CEO of a $100M+ IT staffing firm, was blunt about the bottleneck. The inability of recruiters to share information and networks is the "number one or number two reason why so many staffing companies can't scale beyond $20 million."

The BDD model works with 5 people. It breaks at 50. Knowledge stays in heads, not systems. When your best developer walks out the door, their $800K salary was also funding the firm's entire lead-generation intelligence — and that intelligence walks out with them.

Network Blindness isn't just a visibility problem. It's a scaling bottleneck.

The Math

• Top BDD salary: $800K/year
• 90% non-value-added: $720K/year funds guesswork
• WarmPath at $149/seat/month: $1,788/year per user
• If WarmPath moves the ratio from 90/10 to 80/20: doubles productive time
• That's the equivalent of hiring a second BDD for $1,788/year instead of $400K

What Dave Said After

When Dave moved to his own fractional CFO practice, he described the exact same challenge from the other side: "I'm doing two to three coffee meetings a week. If there was a way to make sure I'm scheduling those with people who might actually have a need... that would be huge."

The problem isn't effort. It never was. The problem is visibility.

You're not paying your BDDs to find leads. You're paying them to compensate for a data problem that shouldn't exist.