The Cost of Starting Over: A Financial Framework for Hiring, Developing, and Keeping the Team Your Program Needs

Every time a staff member leaves, your program starts paying — long before you post the job opening.

The obvious costs are easy to see: advertising, background checks, onboarding, training hours, and classroom coverage. The real cost reaches much further. Turnover can mean overtime, leadership time pulled away from enrollment and operations, stressed classrooms, lost family confidence, delayed growth, and months of reduced productivity while a new hire gets up to speed. So the question becomes: do you track it?

Join Kate Woodward Young and Carrie Casey for a session that helps child care leaders view staffing decisions through a business lens. Kate and Carrie will break down the financial impact of hiring, training, developing, and retaining staff — including the often-overlooked cost of director turnover and the time it takes a new leader to bring a program back to full strength.

Participants will explore how to make smarter decisions about raises, performance bonuses, credentialing, onboarding, and staff development. Rather than asking only, "Can we afford to invest in our team?" this session asks the more important question: "What is it costing us when we do not?"

Leaders will leave able to put real numbers to the cost of turnover, weigh a retention investment against the cost of replacing an employee, and build a clearer financial case for keeping the right people.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this 65-minute webinar, participants will be able to:

• Calculate the total cost of replacing one staff member, including direct hiring expenses and indirect costs such as overtime, classroom coverage, and lost productivity.

• Identify the hidden costs of director and leadership turnover, including the time required for a new leader to return a program to full strength.

• Compare the cost of a retention investment — such as a raise, performance bonus, or credentialing support — against the cost of replacing that employee.

• Formulate a financial case for a specific staff investment decision using program-level turnover and time-to-productivity data.