When business leaders talk about expensive teams, they usually mean salary.
When CFOs talk about expensive teams, we’re often talking about something else entirely: unpredictability.

High pay is visible.

It’s easy to challenge and easy to debate.

But some of the most damaging costs in a business don’t sit in payroll at all. They show up more quietly - in missed forecasts, delivery friction, management drag, and repeated attempts to “fix” the same problem.

From a finance perspective, the teams that cost the most are rarely the highest paid.

They’re the most unstable.

Where the real cost actually sits

Salary is easy to model.

Instability isn’t.

Repeated churn creates replacement drag that’s spread across the business rather than showing up as a single line item. Onboarding gets paid for again and again, momentum drops, delivery slows, and knowledge gradually leaves with the people who do.

Replacing the same role twice in a year isn’t just two hires. It’s a structural issue - one that compounds cost across periods.

Management time is a hidden expense.

Fragile teams consume a disproportionate amount of leadership attention.
More escalation, more rework, more checking, more firefighting, all of it pulling senior people into issues that shouldn’t need that level of involvement.

That time doesn’t appear in the P&L, but it has a very real opportunity cost. Every hour spent stabilising a weak team is an hour not spent improving performance elsewhere.

Forecasting breaks before cost does

Teams with frequent joiners and leavers are hard to plan around. Ramp-up assumptions become optimistic, output turns inconsistent, and confidence in the numbers starts to erode.

If you can’t forecast a team’s output, you can’t truly understand its cost.

Why higher-paid teams often look cheaper.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth.

Stable, well-paid teams tend to deliver more consistently, require less oversight, retain institutional knowledge, and absorb change more smoothly.

Their cost is obvious. Their efficiency, less so, and it’s often under-credited.

From a CFO’s perspective, stability turns cost into an asset.

The common leadership trap

Under pressure, businesses often focus on cutting visible costs - right?

Hiring slows, roles stretch, and short-term fixes start to replace long-term design.

What tends to happen next is the opposite of what was intended. Churn increases, interim solutions linger, and delivery becomes fragile.

Cutting visible cost often increases invisible cost.

How CFOs actually think about “efficient” teams.

Efficiency isn’t about low salaries.
It’s about low variance, repeatable output, predictable ramp-up, minimal rework, and a sustainable pace.

None of these show up clearly in a salary benchmark, but all of them materially affect financial performance.

A better question to ask.
The real question isn’t whether teams are paid too much.

It’s which teams would cost the most to disrupt.

From a CFO’s seat, the goal isn’t to build the cheapest teams possible. It’s to build teams the business can rely on, because reliability is what protects margin, forecast confidence, and long-term value.

And those teams are rarely the most expensive ones on paper.

If team stability is starting to affect delivery, forecasting, or cost visibility, it may be time to step back and look at how critical roles are being designed and supported.
We work with finance and operations leaders to build teams that are predictable, resilient, and built to last.
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