You're not hiring people — you're deploying capital. Here's what quality is worth.

Assumptions & audit notes

Billable model. An average professional bills 3.0× base salary in revenue; fully-loaded cost is 1.5× salary; profit is the difference. Both dials are editable above — they're the two numbers a finance analyst will test.

Revenue-per-employee model. Revenue per employee = company revenue ÷ headcount ($250,000). Baseline profit per employee = RPE × operating margin. Incremental output from a better performer flows through at the variable margin — the average of gross margin and operating margin (22.5%) — because incremental output doesn't carry its share of fixed costs (that would be gross margin) but isn't free of supporting cost either (that would be operating margin). The average is the conservative middle; both margins are editable above.

The spread. Top and bottom third run ±50% on output. Basis: the mean of the top third of a normal distribution sits ≈1.09 standard deviations above the overall mean, and the standard deviation of individual output (SDy) is ≈46% of mean output for high-complexity professional and managerial work — 1.09 × 46% ≈ 50%. Source: Hunter, J.E., Schmidt, F.L., & Judiesch, M.K. (1990), "Individual Differences in Output Variability as a Function of Job Complexity," Journal of Applied Psychology, 75(1), 28–42. For lower-complexity roles the published SDy is smaller (≈15–25%) — lower the spread dial accordingly; for sales and billable roles it is often larger.

Reading the numbers. Impact repeats every year the person stays (3–4 years typical). "All hires" figures apply the improvement to every hire — the ceiling, not a forecast. The two modes are cross-checked by the profit-to-salary line under the worksheet: run both with your numbers and they should tell the same story from two directions.