The work is finite. A salary is not.
Most companies have six to twelve months of real data work — not a career's
worth. Once the builds are done, what remains is maintenance measured in hours
per month. Hiring for a finite project creates a permanent cost center,
and the hardest expense to remove from a budget is one with a person attached
to it.
A project is far easier to get approved than a headcount.
A fixed-price engagement is a single line item that often sits inside a
director's or VP's existing signing authority. A new requisition goes through
finance, HR, and a hiring committee, and can take two quarters to clear.
Same money, a fraction of the friction — and no permanent addition to
the org chart to defend next budget cycle.
Loaded cost is roughly 1.3× the salary.
Payroll taxes, health coverage, retirement match, PTO, equipment, software
licenses, training budget, unemployment insurance. A $90,000 analyst costs
closer to $120,000 — and if you use a recruiter, add 15–25% of first-year
salary on top before they've done a day's work.
Three to five months before a hire produces anything.
Writing the req, posting, screening, interviewing, an offer cycle, a notice
period, onboarding, and ramp-up. That's a full quarter or two of paying for the
problem you were trying to solve. We deliver in two to six weeks, with a
working demo at the halfway mark.
One hire gives you one skill set. This gives you the whole stack.
Automation, business intelligence, data architecture, EDI integration,
performance tuning, and process engineering — across both the Microsoft and
Google ecosystems. Very few individual candidates at that salary have all of
it, and the ones who do are expensive, in demand, and recruited away within
eighteen months.
End-to-end means you don't staff the rest of it either.
Discovery, requirements, architecture, build, testing, documentation, training,
and handoff — all of it. No separate business analyst, project manager,
technical writer, or trainer to hire or borrow. One engagement, one price,
one person accountable for the outcome.
Fixed price moves the risk off your side of the table.
If the build takes 40% longer than estimated, that is our problem and the
invoice doesn't move. A hire who underperforms is your problem for six
months, followed by a difficult conversation, a severance question, and
starting the search over.
Key-person risk disappears instead of concentrating.
The usual failure mode: one person builds everything, understands everything,
and then leaves — taking the system with them. We document to a written
runbook and deliberately train more than one person on your staff, precisely
so that can't happen. That's a deliverable, not a nice-to-have.
You keep the capability without keeping the cost.
After handoff, your own trained super users own and operate what we built. You
gain an internal expert without adding a salary — the knowledge transfers,
the payroll obligation doesn't.
Scale it up or stop it cold.
Need more next quarter? Scope another project. Need nothing? Then you pay
nothing. There is no notice period, no severance, and no awkward
restructuring — the relationship ends cleanly the moment the work does.
Making the case internally
"This isn't IT spend. It's a labor cost we're removing, with a
payback period we can put on one slide."
- The recurring cost we're eliminating — from the calculator, in your own numbers.
- The one-time cost to eliminate it — fixed, capped, approved in advance.
- The payback period — usually weeks, not years.
- What happens after — nothing. No renewal, no license, no headcount.
Export the calculator as a PDF, slide deck, or
spreadsheet with all four filled in.