Every owner budgets the salary. The salary is the appetizer.
You post the role at $52,000, shake hands at $52,000, and then the real bill starts arriving in instalments, dressed in language designed to soften you up: statutory contributions, benefits administration, seat licences, onboarding. By the time the dust settles, the person you hired at $52,000 costs you the price of a decent German saloon, every year, forever.
The bill, itemised
- Payroll taxes: employer-side FICA, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation quietly add 10 to 12% before anyone has done a day of work.
- Benefits: health cover, retirement matching, paid leave. Another 20 to 30%, and rising every renewal season.
- Recruiting: agencies charge 15 to 25% of first-year salary. Doing it yourself is cheaper only if your own time is worthless.
- Equipment and software: a laptop, then a licence for every tool the laptop touches.
- Management: somebody must supervise, review, and develop this person. That somebody is you, at 9pm.
- Turnover: the average tenure ends around month eighteen, at which point you pay the whole entry fee again.
Run the numbers honestly and your $52,000 bookkeeper lands between $68,000 and $75,000 a year. Divide by hours of actual productive work and most SME hires cost $40 to $55 per useful hour. Nobody frames it that way in the interview. I am framing it that way now.
What a flat fee changes
A dedicated Gram Pacific employee carries one number, and the number depends on the profession: from $2,000 a month for core support roles, climbing the ladder of specialism to $3,900 for a machine learning engineer and $4,400 for a fractional CFO. That is $24,000 to $52,800 a year, all-in: salary, benefits, recruitment, training, equipment, payroll, daily supervision by an Operations Manager, and a 10-business-day replacement guarantee. There is no second invoice. There is no fine print waiting to ambush you in month three.
Commitment sweetens it further. Three seats on a six-month prepaid term stack an 11% discount, taking a $2,000 seat to an effective $1,780. The team builder will do this math in front of you, which is more than most vendors will.
Should you ever hire locally? Of course. Client-facing roles where a handshake matters, licensed work that needs a local signature, jobs welded to a physical place. For everything that happens on a laptop, the loaded-cost math stopped being an argument some time ago. It is now just a decision you have or have not made.