Everyone in HR is talking about retention.
Every conference. Every panel. Every blog. Every podcast.
We’re drowning in ideas:
✓ increase pay
✓ upgrade benefits
✓ fix workloads
✓ add PTO
✓ train leaders
✓ improve culture
✓ offer flexibility
✓ give more recognition
✓ add more perks
But here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud:
HR struggles with getting retention funded.
The problem isn’t the ideas.
It’s the business case.
So in this article, I’m going to walk you through the real reason CEOs and CFOs say “no,”
and how to build the kind of financial case that finally gets you the approval, budget, and support you’ve been asking for.
This will sting a little:
HR gets the largest budget impact in the entire company
(people are the #1 cost on every P&L)
…but HR is typically the last to get funded.
Why?
Because HR presents ideas with emotion, logic, and benchmarking…
…but CEOs and CFOs make decisions with risk, margin, and financial projections.
When HR says:
“Turnover is hurting us. This training will help.”
The CEO hears:
“This will cost money and I’m not sure what we get for it.”
When HR says:
“Everyone else is paying $5 more an hour.”
The CFO hears:
“That sounds expensive — what’s the ROI?”
When HR says:
“People are burned out.”
Executives hear:
“Soft metric. Hard to prove. No clear financial impact.”
It’s not that your CEO doesn’t care.
It’s that you’re speaking a completely different language.
This is the most important shift HR needs to make.
They just don’t see the invoice.
Turnover doesn’t arrive as a clean $37,500 bill.
It shows up as:
lost productivity
open roles slowing down operations
missed deadlines
overtime and burnout
increased errors
lower customer satisfaction
delayed projects
expensive recruiting
training new hires
higher salaries for replacements
lost institutional knowledge
relationships walking out the door
When you add it up, turnover can cost 1.5–2x salary at a minimum and often MUCH more.
But because it’s quiet, hidden, and fragmented across departments…
…the CEO never feels the urgency.
HR’s job is to show them the invoice they’re already paying.
far faster than they’ll pay money to gain something.
It’s human psychology.
People buy insurance more than they buy lottery tickets.
Executives do the same.
So instead of pitching:
“Here’s what we could gain if we invest in retention.”
You MUST pitch:
“Here’s what we lose if we do nothing — in real dollars.”
Loss prevention language works because CFOs crave predictability, control, and accuracy.
When you give CFOs:
hard costs
direct revenue impact
margins affected
capacity hit
exposure risk
headcount economics
…you’re speaking their language.
You need a number your executives can’t ignore.
Here’s what to calculate:
recruiting fees
job ads
recruiter time
background checks
sign-on bonuses
time to full productivity
training hours
errors and rework
capacity loss
Talk to operations + sales:
How many fewer patients can a clinic see?
How many fewer units can manufacturing produce?
How many fewer tickets can customer service close?
How many billable hours are lost?
What’s the revenue per bay, per seat, per engineer, per researcher?
fines
compliance gaps
errors
overtime burnout
missed deadlines
Replacing a $90k employee with the new market rate of $107k.
This is the part CFOs care about the most.
In a healthcare case let's analyze:
The organization had:
100 nurses
20 vacancies
average billable rate: $250 per patient
full capacity: 750 patients per 7-day cycle
Because of open roles, they were losing:
Just from unfilled capacity.
Not counting overtime.
Not counting burnout.
Not counting errors.
Not counting turnover of the remaining nurses.
Not counting onboarding costs.
When we proposed a $5/hr raise, the CEO finally approved it.
Why?
Because they saw:
Cost of doing nothing: -$37,500/week
Cost of raising wages: much less than that
It became a no-brainer.
This is what HR must do.
“HR becomes part of the decision-making apparatus when you own the numbers no one else has.”
You do this by becoming a translator:
Talk to sales (lost revenue)
Talk to ops (capacity)
Talk to billing (billable rates)
Talk to finance (financial modeling)
Talk to leaders (impact on customers, projects, timelines)
Then you consolidate the story.
When you walk into the CEO meeting with:
the data
the projections
the financial risk
the cost of doing nothing
the solution
the ROI
You’re no longer “hoping” to get approval.
This part matters:
Before AI, HR depended on finance partners to build spreadsheets, models, projections, and ROI cases.
Now?
This levels the playing field.
It makes HR:
faster
smarter
more confident
more credible
more independent
more strategic
And it makes the business case exponentially easier to build.
HR can no longer survive on:
intuition
benchmarking
engagement theory
culture initiatives
“we should do this because it’s right”
Executives want:
risk reduction
revenue impact
margin protection
predictable projections
clear ROI
The HR leaders who win in the next 5 years will be the ones who can say:
“Here is what this costs.
Here is what we gain.
Here is the risk of doing nothing.
Here is the financial case.”
Not the ones who say:
“People are unhappy.”
I’m building an entire Financial Literacy for HR Leaders module inside 10x Talent, where I walk through:
How to calculate turnover cost
How to model retention ROI
How to speak CFO/CEO language
How to build business cases
How to quantify HR impact
How to use AI to build financial models
Templates, calculators, scripts, and examples
And you can try it free for 7 days.