The most expensive door in mining isn't the yellow one on the dump truck. It's a gold one that's revolving.🪙🔄
It's also big, gaudy and expensive, and your best people keep walking out of it.
Every resignation letter is an invoice. Most leaders never see the total.
Let's do some basic math on a single mid-level technical hire walking out the door:
- Recruitment fees and advertising: $15-20k+
- Labour hire to plug the gap while you recruit: $1,500–$2,500 a day for a contractor.
- Lost productivity in the gap between exit and replacement: 3-6 months of output, gone.
- Training and onboarding the new hire: another $20k before they touch a real deliverable.
- Ramp-up to full productivity: industry data says 6 months minimum. Often longer in technical roles.
- IP that walks out the door: client relationships, tacit knowledge, the workarounds nobody documented. Unquantifiable, but real.
- Knock-on effect on the team left behind: morale dips, workload spikes, a second resignation often follows within 90 days.
Conservative all-in cost per departure for a $150k role? $200k-$250k. Lose just 10 people a year and you've built yourself a multi-million dollar revolving door — gilded, jewel-encrusted, and spinning right in the middle of your operation.
Here's the part that should sting: every dollar spent on that door is a dollar you could've invested in the culture that would've kept them.Retention isn't an HR metric.
It's the invisible line item in the P&L your CFO doesn't see.
What's the real cost of your revolving door — and what would you do with that money if you got it back?
Empresario's job is to help clients close the revolving door and reinvest in building cultures worth staying for.
How much is your revolving door costing you?🚪
