Hiring your own new business manager looks straightforward on paper, right up until you add up what it actually costs. Most agency owners budget for the salary and stop there, which is exactly where the sums start to mislead. The true cost of an in-house hire is a stack of statutory charges, tools, turnover and lost time sitting on top of the headline number, and once you total it honestly the picture changes considerably. Take a typical new business manager, or SDR, in London. According to Glassdoor, the base salary sits around £40,000 with a bonus of roughly £10,000, giving a gross salary of £50,000. That headline figure is only the starting point, because as an employer you also carry National Insurance and, under the UK’s auto-enrolment rules, pension contributions on top.
The Statutory On-Costs. Employer National Insurance for the 2025/26 year works out at £6,750 on a £50,000 salary. The pension adds more again. The employer minimum is 3% of qualifying earnings, which for 2025/26 are the band of pay between £6,240 and £50,270. On a £50,000 salary that means 3% of £43,760, or £1,312.80 a year. Put it together and the genuine cost of employment, before anyone has made a single call, looks like this:
- Gross salary: £50,000
- Employer’s National Insurance: £6,750
- Employer’s pension contribution: £1,312.80
- Total: £58,062.80
Then There Are The Tools. Salary and statutory costs are not the end of it. To do the job at all, a new business manager needs data and a working set of tools, and these are not optional extras you can quietly skip:
- Data, something like ALF or WinMo, and you will need it: £10,000
- Email and mobile number plugin: £1,200
- Call charges: £600
- Other: £200
- Total: £12,000
That brings the all-in cost of a new business manager with twelve months’ experience to roughly £70,000.
The Turnover Tax. Now factor in how long they stay. The average tenure of a BDM in the UK is just twelve months, which makes recruitment a recurring cost rather than a one-off. Agency fees typically run from 15% to 30%, so call it 20%. Layer that on and the real annual cost climbs to a fairly eye-watering £84,000. And that figure does not even capture the hidden cost of the gap itself: the weeks the desk sits empty between hires, and the ramp-up period at the start where a new joiner is still learning your proposition and your market rather than booking meetings. A role that turns over every twelve months rarely spends much of that year at full productivity.
What You Are Actually Buying. The more revealing question is what that £84,000 buys in actual prospecting. Speaking to BDMs looking to move jobs, we have found they spend on average around two hours a day genuinely prospecting. The rest goes on research, meetings, training, reading, posting on LinkedIn and the long list of other things they either prefer to do or get pulled into doing to help out. The working year is shorter than it looks, too. Start with 260 working days, take off eight bank holidays and twenty-three days of annual leave, and you are down to 229. A BDM with a year’s experience is likely to be Gen Z, and that group takes just over fourteen sick days a year on average. Add a couple of days for company meetings and away days, and you land on 213 working days. At two hours a day, that is 426 hours of prospecting a year, or about 35 hours a month. Put the two numbers side by side and you are paying £84,000, around £7,000 a month, for roughly 35 hours of prospecting. On that basis the effective hourly cost of the work you are actually buying is far higher than the salary ever suggested, and none of it is guaranteed to be any good.
What The Same Money Buys At Manifest. That comparison is worth sitting with before you advertise the role. Manifest offers a range of standard packages for a good deal less drama and a great deal more experience. For comparable money, instead of gambling on a BDM with a single year behind them, you get a Business Development Lead with an average of ten years’ experience at Manifest, on top of an average of five years in an agency before that. You also get access to a senior management team whose combined experience runs to more than fifty years.
