Every founder I meet has negotiated hard on base salary and has never once modelled ramp. They will spend three weeks arguing a candidate down from £75k to £68k, then accept a nine-month ramp as a fact of nature. The seven thousand saved is real. The four months of ramp they did not fight for is worth more than three times that.
This is not a hard model. It is five inputs and one line of arithmetic. The reason nobody runs it is that the answer is often do not hire yet, and that answer is unwelcome when the board deck already has the headcount in it.
The five inputs
Break-even is the month where cumulative gross profit from their closed business exceeds cumulative fully-loaded cost. That is the whole model.
What ramp is actually worth
Same rep, same quota, same attainment. Only the ramp changes.
Illustrative, on a €600k quota at 65% attainment and 78% margin; run it on your own numbers rather than trusting mine. But the shape holds across every business I have modelled: five months of ramp is worth roughly eight times what a hard salary negotiation gets you, and it compounds across every subsequent hire.
Ramp is a system problem, not a talent problem. You cannot interview your way out of an onboarding you have not built.
The four levers that actually shorten it
When the answer is don't hire
If break-even lands past month eighteen, you are not hiring a rep; you are financing an experiment with your runway. Three conditions make that outcome near certain: the founder has not yet closed repeatably themselves, the ICP is still moving, or there is no inbound and no outbound engine for the rep to inherit.
Fix the engine first. A rep joining a working engine ramps in four months. A rep joining an absence ramps in nine, and usually leaves in eleven.