You Cannot Hire Your Way Out of a Design Problem

Founders are uniquely endowed with an unusual tolerance for pain. You can carry it, so you do. How do we handle this?

An owner we worked with decided the answer was people. He hired an associate advisor, then an operations person, then a second advisor. Revenue rose. Headcount tripled. Three years on, he still had not taken a week away without his computer. And he was busier than when he started.

He did not have a staffing problem, he had a design problem: a structural ceiling wearing the costume of a people problem. And you cannot hire your way out of a design problem, because everyone you add routes through the same place: through you.

Here's what almost every owner does next. And it's a reasonable thing to do. You feel overloaded, you read the overload as a shortage of hands, and you add hands. But the work does not arrive at the firm, it arrives at you. Every new person creates new decisions. How do we handle this? Who signs off? What do we tell the client? And they come back to whoever has always made those decisions. So the hire adds capacity and adds load at the same time. Nine months of relief, maybe 18, then a higher plateau with the same feeling and a permanent payroll.

And here is why this runs for years rather than months. Founders are uniquely endowed with an unusual tolerance for pain. You can carry it, so you do. And every month you carry it is a month the firm does not get rebuilt. It gets paid privately, in a currency no statement shows. Capability is the anesthetic.

There are only two ways to carry the load of a firm. The first is heroics. Everything routes through one exceptional person who knows the standard, holds the relationships, and makes the calls. It works. It is how nearly every good firm gets built. Its ceiling is one person's attention.

The second is structure. The same load, distributed, not to more people, but to defined places. A defined place has three parts, always the same three. First, a defined outcome, so everyone knows what finished looks like. Second, a named owner, so one person is accountable rather than four. And third, a review rhythm, so it gets checked on a schedule instead of when something goes wrong.

Build three of those and watch the picture change. No line returns to the center. That is the whole distinction. Heroics is load on a person. Structure is load on a system, which is why hiring does not solve it. Hiring adds people, and structure adds places for the work to live.

If this were a people problem, it would be close to hopeless. Your people are mostly doing their best, and you are already stretched as far as you can go. A design problem is different. Designs can be changed.

Here is something you can do this week that costs you nothing. Open your calendar for the last two weeks. Mark every meeting only you could have taken. Then ask your two or three key people, separately, this question: what do you wait on me for that slows you down? Sort the list into three causes: information nobody else had, authority nobody else had, or a standard nobody else had written down.

That is your design problem itemized, and none of it is a hiring problem. Information is documentation. Authority is decision rights. A standard in your head is definition. Then give it a rhythm: 10 minutes weekly, naming every place the firm ran on one person. We call this the Heroics Watch.

If you want a real read on how much of the firm still runs through you, start with the Four Firms Assessment. Sixteen questions, about three minutes, free, and the result names the crossing in front of you and routes you to the guide for your firm. thebetteradvisoryfirm.com.

Next week, we'll walk through why growing made your firm worse.