Meet Emily Cho, COO of Northgate Insurance Brokers — forty people, six to eight hires a year, and a six-month gap between 'signed' and 'useful.' She budgets for it, plans for it, and every year watches it cost more than she priced it at.
fictional · illustrative pattern
A new broker at Northgate spends the first month shadowing, the second asking, and the third making mistakes the team quietly fixes. By month six, they're useful. The knowledge they need lives in the heads of five senior brokers — who each lose about three hours a week to babysitting.
Run FlowHealth to confirm →Emily's ramp model assumed it. Her P&L felt it.
The senior brokers are the syllabus, the textbook, and the help desk.
Learning happens by osmosis — at the senior brokers' pace, not the hire's.
Every new hire re-learns the same five gotchas the last one learned.
Ninety pages, printed once, outdated by the first new hire.
It moved the babysitting from five seniors to one — who now lost their entire day.
One great day. Monday morning, back to shadowing.
Emily had accepted the six months as physics.
Insurance specifics, she figured, just couldn't be captured.
Until the P&L landed on her desk, it was easy to believe.
Five seniors × three hours of babysitting. That time went back to the work it was hired for.
The new broker is quoting real business in the second month, not the sixth.
Six hires a year × the faster path to productivity, conservatively — before counting the seniors' time.
The hire got a real ramp. The seniors got their weeks back. Emily got a P&L that finally matched her model.
The fix made ramp speed a system instead of a personality trait — and changed what it felt like to be new.
New hires stop feeling lost in week one, seniors stop resenting the babysitting, and the 'we've always ramped slow' shrug left the culture.
15 hours a week of senior time, six hires a year ramping in six weeks instead of six months — roughly $40,000 a year in productivity.
Now she tells them six weeks — and it's true. Emily stopped treating ramp speed as a fact of her industry and started treating it as a system.
— Emily, after the second fast cohort
Also common
Run the free FlowHealth diagnostic or talk to the consultant. We'll confirm the fix and hand a clear concept to Nathan.