Staffed six seats for one client. They insourced and it cost me $18,400.
Client signed a twelve month agreement in January, verbal plan was to go from two dedicated callers to six by March. They were already 62 percent of my revenue at two seats. At six they would have been closer to 80, and I knew that number was bad when I wrote it down, and I hired anyway because the alternative was turning down work.
Ramp cost: two weeks of paid training per caller before they produce anything usable, roughly $1,100 a head all in with the trainer's time. Dialer seats and data on top. Call it $9,800 to get four new people to the point where they were holding a conversation without a script crutch.
In April the client's acquisitions manager started asking for our call recordings in bulk and our objection handling doc. I sent both. Six weeks later they gave notice under the 45 day out clause, which I had read and priced as unlikely, and stood up their own team offshore. Total damage once I count severance for two people I couldn't redeploy, the unused dialer seats I was locked into through the quarter, and the two months of lower quality output while my best caller was training instead of dialing: $18,400.
The part that stings is that quality did drop during ramp. Contact rate held around 8 percent but qualified leads per hundred contacts fell from about 4 to 2.4 for six weeks, so the client's cost per lead went up right when they were deciding whether to keep us. I handed them the reason.
What I'd do differently: no single client above 40 percent of seat capacity, ramp billed as a setup fee paid before anyone is hired, and never train a new team out of the same hours as the account that's paying for the output. Also, when a client asks for your scripts and your recordings in bulk, that's a signal, and I treated it as a compliment.