The underperformer you can't fire

📩Heads up! We've got a new sending address. Going forward, our emails come from [email protected]. Please add it to your contacts (or safe-sender list) so you never miss an edition.

You know who it is before you finish this sentence.

The person on your team who's "just not doing the job." 

The one you've talked to, reset expectations with, maybe twice. And the one you keep anyway, because every time you get close to the call, the same thought lands: if I let them go right now, I lose everything they know.

An owner told me almost exactly that last week. 

A fractional ops lead who'd stopped delivering, compliance work stacking up, and a second team member "falling through" because the first one had. 

His words: "I keep trying to tell myself, you fire her right now, you're gonna lose that."

That's the trap. 

A bad hire you've convinced yourself you can't replace, so the rest of the business adjusts around them.

And it's expensive in a way that never shows up on a P&L. Robert Half surveyed 1,400 CFOs and found managers spend 17% of their time, nearly a full day a week, supervising poor performers. If that manager is you, that's your Friday, every week, spent propping up someone who should be propping up you.

It isn't irrational. Gallup puts the cost of replacing someone at half to two times their annual salary, and that's a conservative estimate. Institutional knowledge, ramp time, the search itself. 

You've done the math, and the math says wait.

But the math assumes the replacement is slow, uncertain, and expensive. Change those three things and the whole calculation flips.

A client of ours had the same shape of problem: workflows that only lived in one person's head, a team that stalled every time that person did. 

We placed an ops manager from Serbia at $36,000 a year. A comparable US hire was quoting $85,000 and up.

She didn't inherit the old process. 

She rebuilt it, documented it, and took the company to seven figures. The knowledge everyone was afraid to lose turned out to be the bottleneck.

Fair. You've been burned once, and a second miss would cost more than the first.

That's exactly why we don't charge a percentage and walk away. Our fee is flat, and it carries a 120-day replacement guarantee: if the hire doesn't work out in the first four months, we replace them at no charge. 

Median time to placement is 17 days, and half our clients hire from the first shortlist we send. The search you're dreading is shorter than the quarter you've already lost.

The payoff isn't just a better operator. It's the 17% of your week you stop spending on damage control, the second team member who stops sliding, and the pivot you've been putting off because ops couldn't carry it.

If this sounds like your situation, reply to this email or book a discovery call below. We'll tell you in 20 minutes whether the seat is fillable in the next three weeks, and what it should cost.

>>>> Book Your Free Call <<<<

Until next time,
The Go Carpathian Team