Economise on salaries, and you economise on nothing

Carsten Maschmeyer, a German investor and entrepreneur, holds a conviction that boardrooms rarely voice aloud. Those who economise on salaries do not economise. Those who economise on well-trained, committed people pay the difference later — in turnover, in the cost of errors, in decisions unmade. This is not new. Every seasoned investor knows it. Yet many speak of salary as though it were a cost line, not an investment.

This is the point that matters: salary is not a cost line. It is an investment. And like any investment, this rule holds — buy too cheaply, and you sell yourself dear in the end.

Imagine this scene in any mid-sized business. It is autumn, margins are under pressure again. The finance director says: cut costs where customers will not see it. Reduce the headcount budget. Keep salaries flat or raise them? Not in this cycle.

What follows? The best developer leaves. The experienced project manager follows in month two. The one person who stayed now carries two jobs and knows they are underpaid. They do the work, but not with the attention that critical decisions deserve. New errors appear where none existed before. Suddenly the problem is not the wage-cost ratio — it is the failures that turnover has left behind.

This is not chance. This is mathematics.

Maschmeyer has had good experiences with people who are paid well. That sounds like conviction, not statistics — and that is exactly what it is. But behind it lies something worth taking seriously: people who receive the signal that their work is valuable behave differently. They stay. They think. They make decisions, not merely execute tasks. And when turnover falls, replacement costs fall with it, induction costs, error costs, delay costs. The full account reads differently very quickly.

This is not sentiment. It is sustainable.

Here is what is interesting: Apuna already lives this conviction. The company publishes its salaries openly. Not as a marketing trick, but as operational reality. And the freelancer markup? There is none. Apuna passes on what freelancers cost — transparent, plus operating expenses, nothing more. That means: clients pay for the work, not for a markup game. And the people who work for Apuna see immediately that the maths adds up fairly.

This is the reverse path — not economising on salary, but economising on obfuscation.

Perhaps this is the first test for an investor or a manager: would I publish my own salary openly? Would I show my full business cost structure in the open? If the answer is no, it is worth asking why. Because transparency is not the risk. Opacity is the risk. The person paid poorly and left in the dark is the expensive person who walked out the door.

Salary is investment. Transparency is trust. Trust is what remains when all other tricks have stopped working.

*TF advises Apuna on questions of commercial positioning and market entry. His background spans business management, the automotive and agricultural sectors, supply chain, management consulting, and international business across Europe, the United States, Japan, Eastern Europe, and China.*