Do you need to hire – or clear the ladder?
Overwhelm arrives as one feeling – I need to hire someone – and it's almost never 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 at the bottom, steady and yours to define, is really a hire. List the jobs eating your week, walk each one down, and see how little reaches the bottom. Nothing you type is saved or sent; it's yours for this sitting.
Not sure? Work it out
Turn on JavaScript to walk your week down the ladder here – or take the four rungs below and do it on paper.
Add the jobs eating your week and walk each one down the ladder. As the rungs fill, this tells you what's really a hire – and what to do with the rest.
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.
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.
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 hire or an outsource comes down to hours: a full seat only pays once the work is steady and near-full – below that, you pay for hours you don't fill. The move: write the steps, then decide hire or contract by the hours.
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. The cut-off it uses – work worth less than a third of your hourly rate is a hand-off – is a common rule of thumb; the loaded cost of an employee, 1.4 to 1.8 times salary, is the standard estimate.
Walk your whole week down, not just the job that's loudest today. Most owners find the pile that felt like a hire mostly stops, automates, or hands off – with, at most, one real seat at the bottom. Clear the rungs above it, define that seat properly, and you spend the money once, on the right thing.
Want to see where the overwhelm starts?
The two-minute sales scorecard reads seven areas of owner-led selling – capacity among them – and points you to the ones worth starting with. No email, no sign-up.
This is yours to use, whether or not we ever speak.
Walking your week down the ladder is the same pass we'd do together. The difference a fractional seat makes isn't the ladder – it's the judgment about which jobs are yours alone to do, the honest read on which "hire" is real, and the standing hand that gets the rest off your plate. If that's what you're after, the first conversation is free.