🧑‍💼 Why hiring is the last thing you should do

You have a problem: you are too busy. You need help. What should you do?

Most people in this situation opt to hire employees or freelancers to work alongside them and relieve the pressure. This is often the first thought, a hire-first mentality, a kneejerk reaction.

In effect, they are hiring people in an attempt to improve the system - the system has led them to become overburdened, they hope that by adding another person into the system it will spread the burden and lighten their load. This is a mistake.

Do not hire to improve systems. Only hire to improve bandwidth within the system.

Adding people into a bad system merely multiplies your problems, when you hire you just have more people doing the wrong things. Change becomes harder, costs become higher, problems are left unsolved. Fix the system before you expand it.

If you are too busy, you need to first look into what specifically is causing the problem. Which tasks are taking your time? Which tasks are taking your energy? These are not necessarily the same things, we need to identify both.

When you know what the main culprits are that take your time and energy, create a simple process outline for those tasks. What are the steps that take place to complete that task? A pen and paper task list or a diagram is fine.

The next thing to do is to run through the ESAD acronym. Importantly, do it in order:

🗑️ Eliminate - bin all steps that are not strictly necessary. Often, the entire task can be eliminated. This can include cutting out bad clients or low-profit services. Simple questions to ask yourself to help you: if I stopped doing this what would be the consequence? Would stopping this make something else significantly more difficult? Would my client miss it so much that they would reevaluate working together?

✂️ Simplify - How can the process be simplified? What parts can be removed or readjusted? Would things run smoother if I changed when this action happens? Or if I changed who is responsible for completing the action? Changing the flow can make a surprisingly large difference. This simplify step includes stripping processes back to basics and standardising them, such as through the creation of SOPs. You can use ScribeHow to make SOPs quickly and easily.

⚙️ Automate - automate the process as much as possible. Even if you are not great with computers you can easily use Make, IFTTT, or Zapier to automate a lot of your tasks (both personal and professional!). From switching the lights off when you leave the house to invoicing clients, you can probably automate it. Automation is MUCH cheaper, easier, and more reliable than delegation.

🤝 Delegate - If you still need help, now you can hire. You have the added bonus of knowing exactly what things you need them to do and a well documented process on how to do it. Your employee will be both happier and more efficient.

By going through these steps, you have likely eliminated the need to hire anybody at all in the vast majority of cases. This will save you a LOT of money, and even more time.

When it comes to improving systems, do what you can to improve the system yourself and then seek an objective point of view, ideally from an expert. The insights you get to further improve your systems will be more than worth it. Hire employees to execute when the system is running at an acceptable level of efficiency.

When you are ready to hire, you usually want to start out by hiring freelancers as generally it is easier, higher quality, lower risk, and provides more flexibility. Whether a freelancer or an employee, every new hire adds a lot of complexity. This complexity scales much more quickly than you think. The below example illustrates it.

Keep things simple. Only hire after eliminating, simplifying, and automating.

Some people argue that not everybody needs to be able to talk to everybody else. In a small business, this is rarely true. Bottlenecking communications by being the main point of contact as the owner is a common mistake with small businesses, it makes it incredibly difficult for you to grow as you spend time on passing messages rather than working on the business. Trust your people. If you can’t trust them, find new people.

💡 Quote I'm pondering

"Robots aren't taking the jobs of humans, humans have been doing the jobs of robots”

Click here to share this quote on Twitter

Breaking from tradition, the above is actually a quote from a university lecture on automation that I gave in late 2017. One of the first talks I ever gave to a large audience.

Thankfully I am a much better speaker today, I shifted on the skills continuum. Here are the presentation slides from the talk.

A student from that lecture recently reached out to me on LinkedIn as they are now running their own start up and wanted to thank me for changing their outlook on work and automation. That conversation, coupled with a recent client session, inspired this edition of Work Smart Wednesday.

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-september-13

👋 Want to work together?

When you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:

🔍 Clarity Call - we will discuss your situation and create a step-by-step action plan together so you know exactly what you need to do next for maximum impact

👓 StartSmart - Achieve a 6 figure income within 6 months, whether you only have an idea or you have already started your business

🧘 Overload to Optimal - reduce your workweek to 20 hours or less within 90 days while running your 6-8 figure business