Elena Marsh · Co-founder, Operations
Every busy team reaches the same moment: the work is late, everyone is stretched, and the obvious answer is to hire. Half the time, it is the wrong answer.
A new hire inside a broken workflow doesn’t remove the bottleneck — they queue behind it like everyone else. We’ve watched companies add three people to a fulfilment team and ship exactly as late as before, because the delay was never hands. It was handoffs.
Run these three checks first
1. Time the handoffs, not the tasks. Ask each person how long their step takes, then measure how long work sits between steps. In most teams we audit, waiting dwarfs doing by three to one. Fix the queue before staffing the step.
2. Count the rework. If more than one job in ten comes back for corrections, every new hire multiplies the rework loop. Document the top three error causes and kill them at the source.
3. Price the manual middle. Add up the hours spent copying data between tools each month. If it exceeds half a role, an automation — not a hire — is the cheaper fix, and it starts working next week.
When hiring is right
Sometimes the process is genuinely fine and demand has simply outgrown capacity. You’ll know because the three checks come back clean: short queues, low rework, little manual glue. Then hire with confidence — and hand the new starter the SOPs your audit produced.
The rule we coach every client on: never hire into a queue you haven’t measured. Measure it, shrink it, and half the time the hiring plan shrinks with it.
