The Retention Studio LLC · Retention Intelligence™
The Retention Reality Check™
A guided diagnostic workbook for founder-led companies
Most founders don't lose people overnight. They lose them in the quiet moments nobody flagged.
Know exactly who's at risk of leaving — before they tell you.
This guided diagnostic workbook scores your company across five retention touchpoints — the specific moments where people decide to stay or go. You walk away with a composite score, a 30-60-90 day action plan, and a clear picture of where your company stands.
No prep. No team required. Built to complete in one sitting.
theretentionstudiollc.com
What this is and how to use it.
What This Is
A diagnostic built for founder-led firms.
The Retention Reality Check™ is a guided diagnostic workbook — not a quiz, not a survey. You work through it section by section, touchpoint by touchpoint, and build a real picture of where your company stands. It measures retention health across five proprietary touchpoints: the specific moments where people decide to stay or begin looking for the exit.
Who It's For
Founders and company leaders who are honest enough to look.
This tool is designed for the leader of a founder-led professional services company. Someone with direct visibility into how their people are managed, developed, and experienced inside this firm. Answer as the person responsible for the conditions your team works in — not HR and not as an outside observer.
How to Use It
Rate honestly. Not aspirationally.
You'll move through five sections of five questions each. Rate every statement on a scale of 1 to 4, based on what is actually true in your company right now, not what you intend to do or what used to be true. The most valuable results come from the most honest answers. There are no wrong scores. Only accurate ones.
What You'll Get
A score. A breakdown. A clear next step.
At the end you'll receive your composite Retention Reality Check™ score out of 100, a full breakdown across all five touchpoints, written interpretation of your highest-risk areas, a 30-60-90 day action plan built around what you found, and an ROI calculator that puts a dollar figure on what one avoidable departure costs your firm. Most founders finish in 60 to 90 minutes — and identify their highest-risk person within the first 20 questions.
The Retention Studio LLC · Retention Intelligence™
The Retention Studio LLC · Retention Intelligence™
The Five Retention Touchpoints
The specific moments and conditions where people quietly decide to stay — or begin looking for the exit.
The 5 Retention Touchpoints
C
01
First 90 Days
Connect
Whether new hires feel personally seen, safe, and anchored early — so they make it past year one with energy rather than doubt.
Not just week one — the full 90-day arc. Whether the experience is consistent or entirely dependent on who happened to be available when they joined.
Onboarding consistency
30-60-90 clarity
Early belonging
A
02
6-18 Months
Align
Where unspoken misalignment quietly turns engaged people into flight risks — if nobody catches it.
Does the actual job match what was described? Does the company operate by the values it claims? When expectations, role, and reality drift and no one names it, good people disengage quietly — then suddenly.
Role clarity
Values in practice
Expectation drift
P
03
Right Person, Right Role
Place
Whether people feel in the right seat, on the right cases, with the right manager — belonging and team dynamics live here.
Are your people positioned where their actual strengths live — or where the company needed a body? Misplacement shows up as flatlined performance, quiet disengagement, and that sense that someone has more to give than they are giving here.
Belonging
Role fit
Team dynamics
I
04
Growth and Development
Invest
If they cannot see a path with you, they will build one without you.
Whether they can see a future, stretch, and progression here. Investment gaps are almost never about compensation. They are about whether leaders show up for their people's growth in ways that actually land — personally, not generically.
Career conversations
Recognition quality
Development investment
A
05
Advocacy and Legacy
Amplify
When everything before works, your best people become your loudest advocates — recruiting, referring, and stabilizing culture.
When Connect, Align, Place, and Invest all land, your best people become your best recruiters. When they do not, they quietly exit instead of staying and building.
Team advocacy
Referral behavior
Cultural contribution
"When people feel seen, they stay. When they stay, they build. And what they build becomes your business."
Case Studies — see how three different firms scored
Case Study 1 · Fast-growing agency
▼
Vantage Creative · 18 people
Connect 9
Align 11
Place 14
Invest 10
Amplify 13
The Slow Leak
People are not leaving dramatically. They are leaving in the way that is hardest to see coming.
- Vantage doubled headcount in 18 months. Onboarding and alignment infrastructure never kept pace — people joining now have a fundamentally different experience than the founding team.
- Connect and Invest scores reveal that new hires feel dropped in rather than guided through. The structure that existed at 9 people doesn't scale to 18.
- Three departures in the past year. All within the first 14 months. None flagged in advance.
Scores represent a realistic pattern for fast-growing professional services firms.
Case Study 2 · Established consulting firm
▼
Meridian Advisory · 44 people
Connect 15
Align 16
Place 12
Invest 8
Amplify 14
Calm on the Surface
The company looks stable. The data suggests it is more fragile than it appears.
- Strong onboarding and clear values — but development investment has quietly flatlined. People feel seen in year one and invisible by year three.
- The Invest score of 8 is the single highest-risk number in this profile. It indicates that career conversations are reactive at best and absent at worst.
- The departures that hurt most are the ones nobody saw coming. At Meridian, those tend to be the three-to-five year employees.
Scores represent a realistic pattern for well-established firms with strong culture but underdeveloped development infrastructure.
Case Study 3 · Intentionally retention-focused
▼
Clearpath HR · 27 people
Connect 17
Align 16
Place 15
Invest 16
Amplify 14
Built to Hold
The infrastructure is strong. The gap is in how loudly people are advocating for it.
- Clearpath scores strong across four of five touchpoints — a genuine retention-first culture with intentional systems behind it.
- The Amplify gap is the one worth watching: people love working there but don't talk about it. Referrals and word-of-mouth are underperforming relative to the quality of the internal experience.
- For Clearpath, the next investment is turning satisfied employees into active advocates — before a competitor figures out how to recruit them.
Scores represent a realistic pattern for firms that have invested deliberately in retention infrastructure.
Almost There
Three final questions.
Context · Not scored · Shapes your recommendations
Tap any question to reopen and change your answer.
Your Retention Reality Check™ — Results
—
out of 100
17–20
Strong
12–16
Developing
7–11
At Risk
0–6
Fragile
Your Scores — tap any section to expand
What This Is Costing You
Your Retention Cost Calculator
Enter two numbers. See what one avoidable departure is costing your firm.
Salary of last person who left ($)
Months until replacement was productive
Replacement Cost
—
Salary × 1.5 — recruiting, onboarding, ramp time
Productivity Gap
—
Revenue absorbed during transition period
Total Exposure
—
Per departure. One prevented exit covers the Audit 20-60x.
If that number lives only in your head, it's easy to ignore. When it's on paper, it tends to change budgets.
Your 30-60-90 Day Action Plan
Start with the band that matches your overall score. You do not need to do everything — pick one or two actions per column and move on them this week.
Strong — Score 85 to 100
Protect what is working. Close the remaining gaps before they compound.
▼
Days 1 to 30
- Document what is driving your strongest touchpoints so it does not live only in your head
- Identify the one touchpoint with the lowest score and name one specific gap
- Run a stay interview with your top three performers — confirm what is keeping them
Days 31 to 60
- Design one lightweight system for your lowest-scoring touchpoint
- Share your Retention Reality Check™ results with your leadership team and discuss what surprised you
- Set a quarterly rhythm for retention check-ins — put it on the calendar
Days 61 to 90
- Retake one section of the diagnostic to see if scores have shifted
- Identify who owns retention conversations in your company — make it explicit
- Schedule a 6-month re-run of the full Retention Reality Check™
Developing — Score 65 to 84
Build structure into the gaps. The founders who move now rarely have to move urgently.
▼
Days 1 to 30
- Run stay interviews with your top five performers — ask what would make them leave
- Name the one touchpoint your company has never formally addressed
- Have one honest conversation with a team member you scored low on Invest or Align
Days 31 to 60
- Write down what actually happens in a new hire's first 30, 60, and 90 days — document the real experience, not the intended one
- Audit the last three departures — identify the earliest signal you missed
- Create one recurring touchpoint for career conversations — put it on the calendar
Days 61 to 90
- Present your Retention Reality Check™ findings to your leadership team and decide what gets fixed first
- Assign clear ownership — who is responsible for retention in your firm?
- Define what success looks like in 90 days for your lowest-scoring touchpoint
At Risk or Fragile — Score below 65
Move now. One or two more departures could cascade. This window is real.
▼
Days 1 to 30
- Name the one person most at risk of leaving right now — have a real conversation this week
- Do not spread effort everywhere. Choose your single lowest-scoring touchpoint and commit
- Run stay interviews with anyone in their second or third year — this is your highest-risk cohort
Days 31 to 60
- Build one intervention for your primary leak — a structured check-in, an onboarding map, a career conversation cadence
- Debrief on the last departure honestly — what signal did you have and what did you do with it?
- Identify your retention infrastructure gaps — what systems don't exist yet that should?
Days 61 to 90
- Evaluate whether you need outside help to move faster — the cost of another departure likely exceeds the cost of support
- Retake the diagnostic to measure movement — at minimum on your two lowest touchpoints
- Set a 90-day goal: what does one improved touchpoint look like in measurable terms?
How to debrief this with your team
Share the findings. Not the blame.
Lead with the score as a system finding, not a judgment. "Our Connect score is 11. That tells me our onboarding infrastructure needs work — not that anyone failed."
Share your lowest-scoring touchpoint only. Don't present the whole diagnostic at once — pick the one area that needs the most attention and make that the conversation.
Ask, don't tell. "What does this look like from where you sit?" is more useful than walking through your interpretation. Let them add to it.
End with one decision. "What's the one thing we're going to change in the next 30 days?" Not five. One. Retention improves when you close specific gaps, not when you talk about all of them.
You know where
the gaps are.
Now build the system.
the gaps are.
Now build the system.
The Audit goes deeper than this diagnostic. All five touchpoints assessed in one day — your time commitment is 2-3 hours. You leave with a complete diagnosis, a turnover cost analysis, a manager blind spot assessment, a Diagnostic Report with root causes, a 90-Day Action Roadmap, and one precision fix deployed before the session ends. A Day 7 check-in call is included.
Use code AUDIT for $500 off — applied at checkout when you book from this page.
Book the Audit →
No obligation. 60 minutes. You'll know within the first 30 whether it's worth continuing.
