Will hiring someone fix the overwhelm?

Every word of the video, in plain text.

About 18 months ago, we began to feel overwhelmed. We'd built a successful consultancy business over a number of years, and we cared about it. The work was good, the conversations were flowing, the demand was growing. So we did what most firms do at that point. We looked to hire. And, if I'm honest, we weren't looking to do it as a way to expand what we could do. We were looking at it as a stress reduction. A way to get our heads back above water. We were hiring from overwhelm. Not from planned strength. Now the motivation was clear enough, but it was the wrong one.

So anyway, we brought in a part-time junior analyst for three months. The role we had written looked sensible on paper. Meeting preparation, analysis, a first cut of insights for client conversations. And the truth is it was broken before they even sat down. The mechanical work it depended on – the pulling of data, reconciliations, running variances – wasn't defined well enough to hand to anyone. It lived in our heads. We were doing it differently every month on instinct because we'd never had to teach it to someone else. So the analyst was working with unreliable inputs and undocumented steps. And they couldn't tell whether the output was right because we'd never defined what right was. The overlap and the oversight cost us more time than the relief it was buying.

We were trying to solve an undefined problem by adding a person to it. And no amount of talent or seniority in that person could have fixed it. Because the gap was never in them. It was in the work we handed them. You cannot delegate work you haven't defined.

And I tell this story because we see the same shape play out for our owners all the time. Just from a different seat. You reach the point, for example, where selling has come to the point where it has to come off your plate. And so the question becomes whether you need a salesperson, a sales manager, a VP of sales. And you make the hire. But the way the work actually gets won lives in your head. Done differently in every deal. On instinct. Never written down. Never taught. The person you bring in is working with the same undocumented steps and no shared definition of what good looks like. They underperform. And the quiet conclusion you reach is that nothing around here runs without you. But the hire didn't fail you. The undefined work failed them.

So, before the question of who should I hire, the question that is really sitting underneath it: understand the problem you're actually trying to solve. Separate the two portions of it. The judgment work and the mechanical work. And codify both. The problem and the solution. Once you've done that, you can see clearly where to fix the process, where to automate, where to hire. And hiring becomes the one option among several instead of the default response to overwhelm.