[Home](https://stoneforgegroup.com/) · [Tools](https://stoneforgegroup.com/tools/) · The before-you-hire ladder A Free Tool # What's actually left for a hire? Overwhelm arrives as one feeling – *I need to hire someone* – and the ladder exists to test whether hiring is really the first answer. Before you fill a seat, there's a ladder every job runs down: could it just stop, could a tool do it, could someone else do it – and only what's left for someone else, steady and yours to define, is really a hire. Work through the three steps below. Nothing you type is saved or sent; it's yours for this sitting. [Prefer to watch first? “Will hiring someone fix the overwhelm?” →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/questions/should-i-just-hire-someone/) 1 ### Set your rate One number: your own pay plus the business's profit, divided by the hours you actually work. The hours you're carrying are costed against it, so start here. Not sure? Work it out The same sum, done for you: take-home plus business profit, divided by the hours you actually put in. Rough is fine. Leave the hours blank and we use 2,080 – forty a week, fifty-two weeks – and a longer year than that makes the rate lower. Enter this first – it prices the hours you're carrying. 2 ### List the jobs in your week One line per job, with a rough hours guess – daily, weekly or monthly, we convert it to a weekly load: a day counts as five a week, a month as twelve spread across fifty-two. On a six- or seven-day week, pick “a week” and enter the total yourself. Place each down the ladder; the walk asks a few quick questions and settles it. Do your **whole** week: the ladder decides at the bottom what stops, what automates, and what actually needs a person. Turn on JavaScript to walk your week down the ladder here – or open “What each rung means” below and do it on paper. 3 ### Your decision Set your rate, then list and place the jobs in your week. As the rungs fill, this lands on a straight answer: what's really a hire, and what to do with the rest. What each rung means 1 **Stop it.** The rung everyone skips. Not "could it be better" – could it just stop, and would anything real break? Reports no one reads, meetings that decide nothing, work that made sense two years ago. The move: stop it for a month and see if anyone notices. 2 **Automate it.** If it has to happen but no one has to *decide* anything, a rule or a tool does it cheaper than a person and never skips a step. The move: write the trigger and the steps to done – that's the brief for automating it. 3 **Hand it off.** A person has to do it, but it isn't your judgment. Rote work goes to an assistant or a VA; skilled work to a specialist. Whether that's a full seat comes down to hours: a full-time seat only pays once the work is steady and near-full – below that you're paying for hours you don't fill, and the same work goes to a part-time employee or a contractor instead. The move: write the steps, then let the hours decide full seat, part-time, or contract. 4 **Keep it.** What's left when the other three have taken their share. This is the work only you can do – and the work a real hire is meant to protect, not replace. The move: guard the time for it; the room comes from clearing the rungs above. This walks the eliminate–automate–delegate cascade – widely associated with Tim Ferriss's *The 4-Hour Workweek* – down to the question owners skip: what's actually left for a hire. Your hourly rate isn't a gate here – it prices the hours: the leak figure and the printed sheet cost every hour you're carrying at it, and the walk itself decides what's a hand-off. The loaded cost of an employee – roughly 1.25 to 1.4 times salary once payroll taxes and benefits are in, more once recruiting and overhead are counted – is the standard estimate. **Overhead.** The running costs a business carries regardless of which particular jobs it is doing – premises, administration, insurance, the people not on the tools. [Full entry →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/glossary/#overhead) Questions owners ask before hiring ## Should I hire someone, or outsource the work? It comes down to hours and steadiness. Work that's ongoing, close to full-time, and core to the business is worth a hire. Work that's occasional, spiky, or specialist is cheaper to outsource – you pay for the hours you use, with none of the fixed cost. The rough lines this tool uses: thirty steady hours a week reads as a real seat, twenty to thirty as a borderline one, and below twenty the hours are better bought than hired – part-time or contract. ## How do I know if I actually need to hire? Run every job eating your week down one ladder before you fill a seat: could it just stop, could a tool do it, could someone else do it – and only what's left for someone else, steady work someone qualified could own and you can define, is really a hire. Many owners find far less gets that far than the overwhelm suggested. ## How much does hiring someone really cost? More than the salary. Once you load employer taxes and benefits, the true cost of an employee runs about 1.25 to 1.4 times their base pay – more again once you count recruiting, ramp and overhead. And a full-time seat buys forty hours a week whether the work fills them or not – so a full seat made for a few hours of real need is paying for hours nobody fills. Part-time employment and contracting both exist for exactly that gap. ## What is the eliminate–automate–delegate method? A simple order for clearing work off your plate, widely associated with Tim Ferriss's *The 4-Hour Workweek*: first ask what could stop, then what a tool could do, then what someone else could do – in that order, never skipping a rung. What survives all three is work only you can do. This tool runs it down to one question: what's left for a hire. ### Want to see where the overwhelm starts? The two-minute sales scorecard covers seven areas of owner-led selling – capacity among them – and points you to the ones worth starting with. No email, no sign-up. [The Sales Scorecard →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/scorecard/) ### This is yours to use, whether or not we ever speak. This ladder is yours to run any time, on your own. A fractional seat is a different thing altogether: a senior operator weighing your actual jobs with you – the honest answer on which "hire" is real, the judgment to build the capacity that grows the business, and the standing hand that gets the rest off your plate and keeps it there. The first conversation is free – bring the week you just sorted. [Talk to Us →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/contact/) Fifty minutes, about your business, with the person who'd hold the seat. What this produces is information, not advice – general by design, built from nothing but your own answers, and no substitute for guidance from someone qualified who knows your situation. Using it creates no client relationship or contract with Stoneforge LLC; results are provided as-is, errors and omissions excepted – see [our full terms](https://stoneforgegroup.com/terms/).