Do You Need a New Hire, or a Better Process?

"I need to hire someone"

It usually comes out after a bad week. You're answering the phone, doing the work, sending the invoices, and chasing the payments, and every question in the business still comes to you. Hiring feels like the only way out.

Sometimes it is. But a hire costs more than the paycheck: the employer's share of payroll taxes, workers' comp, the weeks you spend training them, and the time you spend managing them after that. Before you take that on, it's worth a week to find out what the pile actually is.

Look at one week first

For one normal week, keep a running list of the tasks that ate your time. A note on your phone is enough. Finding Out Where Your Time Actually Goes has a simple way to do it.

At the end of the week, sort the list into four groups:

• Repeat work. The same email, the same data typed into two places, the same report rebuilt by hand. Say you spend Friday afternoons building invoices from timesheets. That's a setup problem, and a person would just inherit it.
• Work only you know how to do. Pricing calls, the vendor who only talks to you, the way the schedule really gets built. Nobody can help with this until it's written down.
• Work someone else could do with instructions. Real work that needs a person, but not you.
• Work that doesn't need doing. The weekly report nobody reads. It's usually on the list.

What each group tells you

If most of the week is repeat work, fix the setup before you hire. A new person spending their first month retyping numbers is an expensive way to keep a bad process.

If most of it is work only you know, a hire won't help yet. They'll ask you every question, and you'll be busier for a while, not less. Write the process down first. Write Down How You Do It shows how. A good test: if this were written down tomorrow, who would run it?

If most of it is work someone else could do, and there's enough of it to keep a person busy every week, that's a real hire. Hire, and hand them the written steps on day one.

And cross off everything in the last group before you do anything else.

When it's clearly time

Hire when the work is steady, needs a person's judgment, can't be set up to run on its own, and is already written down well enough that someone new can do it without calling you. That last part is the easiest to skip, and skipping it is how a first hire ends up feeling like more work instead of less.