"What Owners Get Wrong About Hiring."

Most hiring decisions in $1 - $3m businesses happen too late and for the wrong reason.

Owner is overwhelmed. They're the bottleneck. They hire someone to take the pressure off.

New person arrives. Within a few months the owner is still the bottleneck. The hire can't make decisions without them. Capacity problem hasn't moved. Just got more expensive.

The issue usually isn't the hire. It's that the role was undefined, the standard wasn't documented, and the owner's decision-making logic was never transferred.

Hiring before you have documented processes means the new person learns by watching you and asking you questions. Which is exactly the opposite of reducing your involvement.

The sequence that works: document the decisions first. Build the rules. Test them with your existing team. Then hire into a role with a clear standard that doesn't require the owner for every call.

A new person in a well-structured role compounds. A new person in an undocumented one just adds cost and complexity.

What would need to be documented before your next hire actually reduces your workload?