For CEOs and COOs
Your margin runs through your managers.
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An untrained manager shows up on your P&L as escalations that climb to senior people, turnover you pay to backfill, work done twice, and performance lost while nobody's trained them. Manager Fundamentals trains the frontline managers who run your customer-facing and operations teams, and measures each one against their own baseline.
This isn't a people problem. It's an operating cost.
Manager training rarely gets connected to margin, because the cost never arrives as a line item. It arrives as your calendar filling with escalations, a strong rep quitting their manager, the same mistake fixed three times, and a new manager learning the job by trial and error on your customers.
Each of those has a price, and most companies never add it up. When you do, the pattern is hard to miss: a lot of your cost to serve passes through the person who runs the queue.
Where it shows up
Four costs you're already paying.
Escalations that should stop lower
When a frontline manager can't make the call, the decision climbs, and senior time goes to work a trained manager would have closed. That time is scarce already: only 30% of leaders say they have enough time to do their job with the depth it needs (DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025).
Turnover you pay for twice
People leave managers. In BambooHR's 2025 survey, 58% of people who left a job in the last year said their boss's management style was the main reason. Research cited by the SHRM Foundation puts the total cost of turnover at 90% to 200% of annual salary.
Work done twice
When nobody has written down what good looks like, work gets redone and nobody can say whose standard applied. Only 10% of US workers say job descriptions always reflect the reality of the role (Monster, 2026). A role nobody has defined can't be measured, coached or delegated.
Performance lost to waiting
Every month a new manager runs untrained has a price. In a Verizon case study, delaying a new manager's training by a year gave up an estimated $8,552 in performance per manager (Paul Leone, Training Industry Magazine, 2019).
Put a number on yours
Four questions, one afternoon.
Escalations
Hours a week your senior people spend on decisions a frontline manager should make, multiplied by their loaded hourly cost.
Turnover
People who left in the last year because of their manager (the exit interview usually says so), multiplied by your cost to replace one.
Rework
Tickets or tasks reopened or redone in a month, multiplied by the average time to redo one.
Waiting
How long a request sits waiting on a manager's decision in your highest-volume queue, and what that delay costs the customer on the other end.
Add them up and you have the operating cost the program is built to lower. We model cost avoided and time recovered, and nothing else. We don't count revenue you might earn with freed-up hours, because nobody can honestly promise it.
What you get
Something running, and a readout that proves it.
- Every manager leaves each session with something they use that week: a charter, a role doc, a scorecard, a delegation register, an interview kit.
- Each manager is measured against their own baseline: a time audit at the start, and the Team Priority Matrix in week one and week eight.
- A week-eight executive readout: what moved, manager by manager, and what it's worth in the four cost lines above.
- An operations findings appendix: the process problems the sessions surfaced, like missing SOPs, broken handoffs and work only one person can do, with what each one costs.
Taught by someone who's run the queue.
Manager Fundamentals is built and taught by Sal Cervantes, who spent more than fourteen years in SaaS customer operations: support from L1 to L3, implementation, project management and operational leadership across five products. In prior operating roles that meant a 50% reduction in churn, 50% faster onboarding and 20% lower support cost in a single year.
Those are results from roles he held, not promises about yours. They're the reason the program is built around the work your managers actually run, rather than around a slide deck. More about Sal and the practice.
Questions
Asked before, answered plainly.
Forty-five minutes a week, live, for eight weeks, plus about thirty minutes of homework that's done on their own team. If eight weeks won't work, a full-day or half-day intensive covers the first sessions, with a follow-up at day thirty.
Each manager is measured against their own starting point: a time audit at the start, and every person on their team placed on the Team Priority Matrix in week one and again in week eight. The week-eight readout shows what moved, manager by manager, and what that's worth in the cost lines you care about.
It depends on the format and the number of managers. The 60-minute briefing is where we scope it, and you get the price in writing before anything starts.
No. It works alongside HR. Managers learn to run the work, the one-on-ones and the documentation, while anything touching performance, pay or separation still goes through your HR team.
Because most operating cost runs through the middle of the org chart. The queue, the escalations, the rework and the hiring all pass through a frontline manager first. Training is usually the first thing we do with a company, and it tends to surface the operational fixes worth making next, which is where the rest of the practice comes in.
Probably, for a full cohort. The program is built for four or more managers learning together. With fewer, start with the frameworks, which are free and published in full, and come back when the team grows.