The usual trigger for a first hire is exhaustion. That is understandable and it is a poor
signal, because it tells you that you are busy without telling you what you are busy with.
Plenty of overwhelmed owners hire and stay overwhelmed, having added management overhead to the
original problem.
The test that works
Hire when a specific, named constraint is demonstrably costing you more than the fully loaded
cost of the person who would remove it.
Three parts, all required. Specific, meaning you can describe the work in a
sentence. Costing you, meaning you can point at revenue lost or opportunity
foregone. More than the salary, including payroll costs, tools, and the
management time you will spend, which owners routinely underestimate.
If you cannot complete that sentence, you have a prioritisation problem rather than a capacity
problem, and hiring will not fix it.
Find out where the time actually goes first
Log your time for one week in rough blocks. Nearly every owner is surprised, and the surprise
usually falls into one of three patterns.
Most hours in low value repetitive work. The clearest case for hiring, and
often the case for automating instead.Most hours in work only you can do. Hiring will not help directly. Something
must be removed from your plate elsewhere to create room.Hours scattered with no pattern. This is a focus problem. A hire will
inherit the chaos and amplify it.
What to hire first
The instinct is to hire someone like yourself, which feels comfortable and rarely helps.
Better options, roughly in order of how often they are correct:
The thing you are worst at that the business needs constantly. Usually
bookkeeping, operations, or fulfilment. Unglamorous and high return.The thing that generates revenue that you personally bottleneck. If you are
the only person who can sell, that ceiling is your revenue ceiling.The thing you hate. Not a joke. Work you avoid gets done late and badly,
and the cost of that is real but invisible.
Hire last for work that is strategic, judgment heavy, or defines the character of the
business. That work is genuinely hard to delegate early and delegating it badly is expensive.
Contractor before employee, usually
For a first hire, a contractor or part time arrangement is often the better structure. You
learn whether the role is real, you learn whether you can manage someone, and you can reverse the
decision cheaply if you were wrong about either. Many owners discover that the constraint they
identified was not the actual constraint, and finding that out at contractor cost is
considerably better than finding it out at employment cost.
The question underneath
Before hiring, it is worth asking whether you want a bigger business or a better one. These
diverge more often than people expect. A first hire moves you toward the first, and if what you
actually wanted was the second, pricing, focus, and dropping unprofitable work get you there
without adding a person.
Originally published at https://www.ralvan.com/answers/when-should-i-hire.html.
Written by the team behind Ralvan.
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