The Most Expensive Person You Hire May Be The One You Hired To Save Money
The salary you save today may be the client you lose tomorrow.
I recently came across a discussion about hiring a junior event manager at a lower salary rather than paying more for someone with substantial experience. The conversation raised an important question: What does inexperience actually cost a business?
On paper, the decision can look perfectly reasonable. A smaller salary reduces payroll expenses. The position is filled. Someone is answering inquiries, managing bookings, coordinating vendors and handling clients. The numbers look good. Until something goes wrong. A contract detail is overlooked. A promise is made that operations cannot fulfill. An opportunity to increase revenue is missed. A client becomes frustrated because nobody anticipated a problem that an experienced professional would have recognized immediately. Suddenly, that payroll saving doesn't look quite so impressive. And sometimes the most expensive mistakes never appear on a financial report. The client who doesn't return. The referral that never happens. The negative review that influences someone else's buying decision. The prospective customer who quietly chooses a competitor because the experience didn't inspire confidence. Those losses are difficult to measure. But they are real.
Experience Is not simply the number of years someone Has worked. After 40 years in hospitality, more than two decades of that time planning events, I've learned that experience is not just knowing what to do. It's knowing what to look for. It's recognizing the small warning signs before they become expensive problems. It's understanding how a decision made in sales will affect operations three months later. It's knowing when a client's seemingly simple request has implications for staffing, timing, logistics, safety or profitability. And it's having the judgment to recognize when something that looks perfectly fine on paper will not work in practice. Experience is often most valuable when nothing goes wrong, because someone made sure it wouldn't.
This Is not an argument against young professionals. Every experienced professional was once inexperienced. Good businesses invest in developing talent. They mentor, they train, they create opportunities for people to grow. But there is a difference between developing an emerging professional and expecting that person to independently carry responsibilities that require judgment they have not yet had the opportunity to develop. A junior manager supported by experienced leadership can be an excellent investment. A junior manager hired simply because they're cheaper, then left to navigate complex clients and operations alone, may become a very expensive experiment. And that isn't fair to the employee or the customer.
The real cost is often hidden in the customer experience. A hospitality business doesn't simply sell a room, a meal, an event or a service. It sells confidence. Customers want to believe the people they've hired understand their needs, anticipate problems and will deliver what was promised. When that confidence disappears, the relationship changes. The customer starts checking everything, following up repeatedly, questioning decisions, wondering whether someone is actually in charge. By the time the event takes place, the room may be beautiful and the food may be excellent. But the customer's experience of the business has already been damaged. And a beautiful event does not erase a difficult journey.
Before you decide experience is too expensive, Ask what inexperience could cost. What is the value of a retained client? What is the value of a strong referral? What does one poorly handled event cost in staff time, corrective action, refunds or damaged relationships? How much revenue is lost because opportunities were never recognized? And how much is it worth to have someone who sees a problem coming before it reaches the customer? Those are the numbers that belong in the hiring conversation. The objective should never be to hire the most expensive person. It should be to hire the right level of experience for the responsibility, complexity and risk of the position. Because the most expensive employee isn't necessarily the one with the highest salary. Sometimes it's the one whose mistakes cost you customers you never get back.
Wendy Hartigan has spent 40 years in hospitality and founded Angel of Hearts Weddings & Events in 2003. Her work includes wedding and event planning and client experience consulting for hospitality, event and service-driven businesses.
Learn more about the Wendy Hartigan Client Experience Audit: https://www.angelofheartsweddings.com/client-experience-consulting
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