Thirty years leave on a Friday afternoon and walk out of the door.

Product presentation · 1:40

Under two minutes, and you know what this is about

What happens when a key person leaves the company — retirement, resignation, a move to another role. How we stop it, and what ends up in your own filing system. With narration and music; the subtitles run along, in case you show it without sound.

The film sits inside this file — it plays without an internet connection, on a tablet in a meeting room just as well as on a screen. No third-party material, everything made in house.

Self-test

What does it cost you when your key people leave?

Four entries, a result straight away. No form, no email address. Every assumption behind it is disclosed — and you can set them to your own circumstances right here instead of having to take our figures on trust. We deliberately calculate with the avoidable costs, not with whatever looks best.

How this figure is arrived at — with every assumption

We show the calculation, because a figure whose origin nobody knows will not last three minutes in your senior management. All values come from experience and are orders of magnitude, not statistics. Replace them with your own — that is exactly what the assessment is for.

Step	Assumption	Why
Roles affected	Your entry, capped at 25 % of the workforce	More than one job in four is no longer a key role. The cap keeps out fantasy figures.
Years of experience per role	18 years, slider 6 to 40	Average across all reasons for leaving. Higher for retirements alone, much lower for resignations.
Onboarding per role	7 months, times a character factor of 0,8 to 1,3	Until fully independent, not until the first day at work. Longer in manufacturing, shorter in the office.
Level of the roles	Factor of 1,00 to 1,60 on the onboarding	Skilled worker 1,00 · junior management 1,15 · middle management 1,35 · single roles with no deputy 1,45 · senior management 1,60. The higher up, the more of the knowledge sits in decisions and back-stories rather than in manual steps — and the less of it is written down anywhere.
Level surcharge on the vacancy period	0 to 4 additional months	A skilled worker is found faster than a department head, a department head faster than a works manager. The surcharge is added to the vacancy period you set.
Reduction thanks to the dossier	52 %, slider 20 to 70	The effect we commit to, measured against experience in your own department and proven in the acceptance test.
Cost per month of onboarding	68 % of the full cost	The decisive point: not the full staff costs. See the breakdown below.
Vacancy period per role	3 months, slider 0 to 12	Between the leaving date and the successor’s start date. Often longer for skilled staff, zero when the post is filled internally.
Cost per month of vacancy	40 % of the full cost	Overtime, temporary staff, bought-in work, things left undone. Deliberately set low — we offset the saved wage bill against it.
Of which avoidable with a dossier	35 %	Only the part that is down to missing knowledge: the deputy can take over instead of waiting for answers. No dossier shortens the vacancy period itself.

Why 68 per cent and not 100

Component	Share	What is behind it
Productivity gap of the new person	45 %	Someone being onboarded still gets work done — just not at full output. Averaged over the onboarding period, around 45 % of the target output is missing.
Time tied up by experienced colleagues	15 %	Answering questions, checking work, reworking it. That time is missing elsewhere and shows up in no cost centre.
Mistakes, scrap, missed deadlines	8 %	Set conservatively. In manufacturing this item is regularly larger; in the office it hits as a missed deadline.
Total	68 %	At CHF 9'500 fully loaded, that is around CHF 6'500 in avoidable costs for every month the onboarding is shortened.

What this calculation leaves out: Recruitment costs, severance payments, orders lost through late delivery, customer complaints, and the case where a task simply stays undone because nobody knows about it. These items are real, but without your figures we cannot estimate them honestly — so we leave them out of this calculation.

The problem

What gets lost is not in the manual

It is not only the workshop. The same pattern holds across all six levels: what is written down stays. What someone carries in their head leaves. The higher up you go, the more expensive it gets and the later it shows — until a deadline is missed, a customer is annoyed, or a decision is taken with no knowledge of what came before.

The quiet one-offs

Twelve roles that no organisation chart flags as a risk

The most dangerous positions are rarely the ones with the biggest title. They are the ones held by exactly one person, running quietly for years, whose absence only becomes visible on the first day afterwards. In the assessment we go through this list line by line with your department heads — in our experience we find two to four roles nobody had thought of.

This list is not exhaustive and is not meant to be. Every company has two or three of its own that appear on no list — those are exactly the ones we look for in the assessment. The question that reliably finds them is not "who is important", but: Who would you call if something jams at 10 in the evening — and what happens when that number no longer works?

Four scenarios

It is not only about retirements — and you rarely have six months

In a company with 200 employees, more than one key role changes hands every year. The six to eight weeks we normally need are only certain in one of these four scenarios. That is why the approach comes in four speeds — and for each one we say openly what it delivers and what it does not.

What we cannot do in express mode: A dossier produced in ten working days does not contain the same as one produced in eight weeks. The rare tasks are missing — the year-end close, the audit, the machine that only runs in summer. We write these gaps into the acceptance record by name, together with the date they next come round. After that they can be filled in with the successor in one or two sessions. What we do not do: leave such gaps unmentioned — and let you find out about them only when the task comes up for real for the first time.

Approach

Five phases — duration and effort depend on the role

A blanket figure would be convenient and wrong. The effort for the assessment depends on the size of your company, everything after that on how the individual role is cut. Pick the case you are facing — the figures below change with it.

Are six to twenty-four hours really enough for a complex role?

A fair question. The short answer: the number of hours is the time required from your person, not the recording time. We do not sit in a meeting room with them for eighteen hours — we stand next to them for half a day while they work. That costs them about an hour of explaining, not four.

Where the time goes	Share	What happens
Shadowing at the workplace	50 %	We film and ask questions in between. The work carries on — the person does what they would do anyway. The real extra effort is small, which is why we count only half the time we are present as effort.
Focused conversations	30 %	Blocks of 90 minutes on the things you cannot see by watching: decisions, exceptions, back stories. That is real time lost.
Review and technical sign-off	20 %	The person reads what we have written and signs it off. The part no short cut replaces.

And if it is not enough after all?

Then we see it in the acceptance test, not the following spring. That is exactly what it is for. The rework is included in the fixed price, and the cap on your person's hours is stated in the quote: if we have misjudged it, that is our problem and not yours. For very broad roles we say from the start that it takes two stages — a role with thirty years in it cannot be emptied out in eight weeks, and anyone who promises that has not looked at it.

Which category a role falls into we decide not by feel but by three features: the number of independent task areas, the number of systems and interfaces, and whether annual tasks with legal consequences hang on it. The result is in the assessment — before that we name no number of hours, because it would otherwise break at hour nine.

Result · the Firnkern

Three things you have afterwards

The result for each role is what we call a Firnkern: a core through the role in which the annual layers stay readable. What you have afterwards is not unit counts — those depend on the role and only invite counting. It is three things that actually change in your company.

Experience shows that a verbal handover to the colleague next door loses more than half the content — and precisely the special cases that get expensive later. A dossier forgets nothing and is still there when the colleague has moved on. Everything sits in your system, in your format: no platform, no licence, no subscription as a precondition.

Our position

If your company needs it differently

The sample dossier is an example, not a catalogue. The structure has proved itself — form, depth and filing follow you. Anyone who already has a QM system, document control or their own templates gets nothing second alongside it, but something that fits into it.

How we find out what suits you: in the assessment we build a single task in your format and put it in front of you. Only when that one page fits do we build thirty. And if you want something we think is wrong, we tell you — and do it anyway, as long as it does not endanger the acceptance test.

If you want more than a dossier

What else we do — and where we say no

In almost every conversation there comes a point: "Could you actually also …" Usually yes. We have a rule for that, and we put it on the table.

The price of this additional work follows the same measure as everything else: person-days times daily rate, binding in the quote. An emergency folder comes to two or three days, a process with four people involved to eight or twelve. What we do not do is a daily rate without a result — with us you never buy attendance, you always buy something that has passed acceptance.

After the handover

How a dossier is maintained long after we have gone

The most important question of all — and the one most knowledge projects fail on. A dossier that nobody maintains is not empty after eighteen months, it is wrong. And wrong is worse than empty: someone who finds nothing asks. Someone who finds something out of date acts on it.

The four triggers

The honest caveat: We cannot guarantee the maintenance, because it happens in your house and not in ours. What we can do is make it as easy as possible, and as visible as possible when it does not happen. If half the change history is empty after two years, that is not down to the tool — then the project has not found an owner, and we will say so openly at that point.

Confidentiality

Your internal information does not leave your house

We work with manufacturing knowledge, costings and customer histories. So this is not small print, it is part of the service.

The uncomfortable part

Every recording is made on our device first. Anything else would be a lie.

Many providers promise that "all your data stays with you". We do not, because on an honest view it is not true. There are four kinds of raw material : camera footage from the shop floor, audio recordings from the conversations, screen recordings from your systems — which often show real customer names and prices — and the transcripts made from them. All four are created on our devices, and we work them up there too. That is not an oversight but a decision: editing, transcription and writing the task sheets need tools and time that nobody has on a guest account. Instead of a promise that would not survive the first question from your IT, you get something from us that can be checked — a named chain, fixed rules at every stage and a contractual deletion commitment with a record.

Five commitments

We let ourselves be measured instead of reeling off references

This is how we start

Two calm routes — and one for when it is already burning

You do not have to buy in order to see what you get. Almost all clients start with the conversation and decide afterwards. If notice has already been given, however, the third route below applies — the orderly sequence would then be the wrong first step.

What a single Firnkern costs is set out just below — the exact figure follows the assessment. We expressly recommend never deciding more than the next step at a time.

Price scale for the assessment

What two days cost depends on how many conversations fit into them

The effort does not come from the company but from the number of managers we speak to: one 45-minute conversation per department head, plus preparation, walkthrough, rating under the four-eyes principle, results document and presentation. That is why the fixed price is scaled and not flat.

We tell you which tier you fall into at the initial meeting after two questions — the number of departments and the number of sites. The price is then in the offer and does not change again, even if the assessment takes longer than planned. For companies with more than 250 employees or several plants, we run the assessment in two stages so that the first report does not keep you waiting half a year.

On the express case: If notice has already been given, an assessment would be the wrong first step — it would use up the weeks you still have. We come for a short 90-minute check, work out with the person's line manager which task areas are genuinely critical, and put an offer forward the next day. You can still do the assessment afterwards — we then credit the 90 minutes against it.

Price per Firnkern

What a Firnkern costs — and why the figure only comes after the assessment

The price does not depend on the size of your company but on the shape of the individual role: how many independent task areas hang on it, how many systems and interfaces it runs across, and whether annual tasks with legal consequences belong to it. None of that can be estimated honestly in advance. So here is the range — and below it the effort it is built from.

Why we do not print a single price per type of role here: we would have to estimate it before seeing the role. An estimated figure breaks at hour nine — and you would then face the choice of paying more or receiving half a dossier. After the assessment we know the shape of the role and name a fixed price that holds. If you need a rough figure beforehand, we will tell you at the initial meeting which third of the range your role is likely to fall into, and what that depends on.

Price · Firnament

What the overview across several Firnkerns costs

The Firnament is worth it from the fifth core onwards — before that each Firnkern is useful on its own and bringing them together is effort without return.

No fixed price — it would be too expensive with three cores and too cheap with twelve. The effort has exactly two drivers: the one-off setup and the number of cores that go into it. The complexity of the individual role plays no role here any more — that was paid for in the Firnkern, and whether a role has 18 or 40 entries changes twenty minutes in the merging.

Three worked examples: Five own cores, one site, one language — CHF 3'000, because the basic setup is dropped. Eight own cores with integration into your QM system — CHF 6'200. Three cores, but you want the overview now — CHF 7'700, because the basic setup still applies here. For comparison: a single Firnkern costs between CHF 7'900 and 32'000, depending on how the role is cut. The Firnament is the overview of them, not another dossier — and so it has to be clearly below that. If someone charges you the price of a dossier for an overview page, they are selling you a platform.

How four 45-minute conversations turn into two days

A fair question: four times 45 minutes is three hours, not two days. That is true — the conversations are the smallest part. Here is the full breakdown for the first tier, that is 16 working hours.

What	Hours	What happens in it
Preparation, on site and off site	2	Reviewing the organisation chart, age structure, staff turnover and existing job descriptions. Tailoring the set of questions to your company — the questions for a foundry are not the questions for an engineering office.
Conversations with the department heads	4	Four times 45 minutes of pure conversation time plus changeovers, waiting times and the follow-up notes straight afterwards, while the answers are still fresh.
Walkthrough of production and office	2	The part you do not get in the meeting room: which machine nobody but one person operates, which workstation has depended on one person for years. Here we regularly find roles that were not mentioned in any conversation.
Rating under the four-eyes principle	3	Each role is rated separately by both of us by replaceability, scale of damage and time frame. Where we differ, we talk it through — in our experience that is exactly where the interesting cases are.
Results document and role sheets	3	One sheet per key role with reasoning, plus the overall summary, the risk matrix and a recommendation on the order of work. Ready to put before your board without you having to rewrite it.
Presentation on site with you	2	45 minutes of presentation with discussion, plus travel. No report by email: the figures need someone who answers questions.
Total	16	Two working days. Of those we are at your premises on two dates — half a day for conversations and the walkthrough, and 45 minutes for the presentation.

Important for your planning: "Two days" is our workload, not your attendance. The assessment costs your department heads 45 minutes each and your senior management one hour for the kick-off and the presentation. No more. And we do the rating as a pair — that is why these hours count double and are still covered by the fixed price.

There are providers who charge considerably less — why we do not follow suit

If you compare, you will find offers in the range of 2'500 to 7'000 euros for something that is also called "knowledge transfer". That is not a mistake in their price list and not one in ours — they are two different services. Here is the difference, without dressing it up.

What you get there	What you get from us	Why that makes the difference
A facilitated workshop, usually one to two days, between the departing person and the successor	Six to eighteen hours of recording across several appointments, at the machine and at the screen, not in the meeting room	A workshop brings out what someone remembers in conversation. That is the smaller part. The larger part only shows itself in the doing — and only becomes visible if someone is standing next to them.
A method your people are trained in so that they can do it themselves in future	The work itself, done by us, with a finished result	Training is cheaper because the work stays with you. If your managers have the time for it, that is the cheaper route — and we will tell you so.
A set of minutes, a mind map or a filled-in form	A dossier that your person has countersigned sheet by sheet, with deadlines, contacts, problem cases and an annual cycle	Minutes are a summary of a conversation. A dossier is a set of working instructions that someone who knew nothing beforehand can act on.
No verifiable success criterion	The acceptance test: A person who does not know the role works for ten days using the dossier alone, without asking questions. Whatever does not work, we rework — at no extra cost.	That is the real difference. We know of no provider in the German-speaking region who promises a verifiable result. Without this test, you only find out whether the knowledge transfer worked once the person has gone — and by then it is too late.
Travel costs from Germany, appointments subject to availability	Switzerland-wide, travel included, on site within 48 hours in the case of garden leave	When notice has been given, response time decides the outcome. A 600-kilometre drive cannot be slotted in at short notice.

When the cheaper provider is the right one for you — and we tell you so at the initial meeting when that is the case: when the role is well documented and the successor is already trained in. When you want to do it yourself in future and need a method for that. When it is a role that can be learned in three weeks. In those cases a Firnkern would be overkill, and we would advise you against it.

And when it is not: When one person has been doing something for fifteen years that nobody else can do, and is leaving in a year. Then a price difference of a few thousand francs stands against a risk of loss in a completely different order of magnitude — work it out for yourself in the calculator above. The comparison that counts is not offer against offer, but offer against damage.

The first step

45 minutes. After that you know whether it fits for you.

We bring a complete sample dossier that you can pick up and hold, and we ask you two questions about your company. No sales pitch about us. Afterwards you decide whether you want to take the next step.