If you hire someone but keep all the decisions (and all the knowledge) to yourself, you haven’t really increased your capacity.
A practical starting point If you’re thinking about hiring, try this. Take an hour, grab a coffee, and write down: What are the top 5 things only you are doing right now? Which of those could someone else take on (with a bit of support)? Where is your team spending time that just doesn’t scale? You’ll usually find the answer sitting right there. You don’t need a full org chart. You just need the next logical step. Hiring before you feel completely ready is often part of the process. Waiting until you’re overwhelmed makes it harder. Hiring too early makes it inefficient. So no, you won’t time it perfectly. But you can time it thoughtfully. Growth will stretch your team. It always does. The question is whether you respond to that stretch deliberately or wait until it becomes a problem. The businesses that scale well don’t just hire more people. They hire at the right moments, for the right reasons, and with a clear idea of what success looks like. I wish you all great success in building the team that takes your business to the next stage.
Another trap I see quite a lot is hiring someone too senior, too early. It’s tempting, right? Bring in someone experienced who can build the strategy, run the function, and “figure it all out.” In fact, one of the best examples I can think of happened in a high-growth business I was part of the founding team for. We wanted to hire a Sales Leader with extensive experience to manage the entire complicated Sales division, including two of the founding team members. The CEO interviewed someone he had worked with before. That person, demonstrating the experience we were looking for, asked some very targeted questions and told us it was too early to hire him. He was right, and we hired him 12 months later after some exceptional growth. Sometimes that works. More often, at this stage, what you actually need is someone who will roll up their sleeves and take ownership of a specific area. Someone comfortable with a bit of ambiguity and happy to build as they go. Sound familiar? It’s not that different from your first sales hire. There’s also a bit of a mindset shift that has to happen here. Up until now, you’ve probably been operating in what I’d call “hero mode.” Everyone jumps in. Everyone helps out. Things get done because people care. Hiring is the start of moving away from that. When someone joins your team, your job isn’t just to give them work. It’s to set them up to succeed. That means: • Giving them context, not just tasks • Checking in regularly (not just when something goes wrong) • Being clear about what matters most • And giving them space to learn, rather than expecting perfection on day one If you hire someone but keep all the decisions (and all the knowledge) to yourself, you haven’t really increased your capacity. You’ve just made your life more expensive.
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