It’s budget season. Somewhere in your planning doc there’s a line that says “new hire” with a number next to it. Maybe it’s a coordinator. Maybe an ops manager. Maybe it just says “help.”
I get it. You’re stretched. Your team is stretched. Everything still routes through you though, right?
Before you even THINK about approving that new budget, I want you to run one review.
Here’s what I see over and over. Owners start hiring their way out of a problem that isn’t simply a staffing problem.
It’s a “nobody knows what done looks like” problem.
Add a person to that, and you don’t get relief… You get one more person inheriting and adding to the mess.
Year-end reviews usually ask one question: “How did this person do?” The better question to ask is “how is the work set up?”
The Capacity Review
Do this in October, before you write a single review or post a job.
Step 1: Map the real week. For each person, list what actually fills their week. Pull it from your project management tool, or ask them to jot it down for one week. Rough hours are fine.
(At GSD Solutions, we have all our team members track their time with Clockify and send a monthly report when they send in their invoice so we can analyze where time is actually spent.)
Here’s a video we have on the importance of transparently having members of your team track hours makes a difference.
Step 2: Write down what “done” means. For their top three to five responsibilities, write one sentence each: what “done” looks like, by when, and how you’d both know it is actually finished. If you can’t write that sentence, it isn’t a performance issue. It’s an expectations gap, and closing it is your job.
Step 3: Sort every task into four buckets.
- Keep. It’s their work, it’s defined, and it’s getting done.
- Clarify. It’s theirs, but “done” was never defined. Fix the expectation before you judge the output.
- Move. It belongs to someone else, or to a role that doesn’t exist yet.
- Cut or automate. It exists because a process is broken, or a tool could do it.
Now evaluate, fairly. Judge each person on the Keep bucket, because that’s the work they actually own. The Clarify bucket doesn’t go in a review. This bucket gets a 30-day reset with the expectation now written down, and then you look again.
Now shift the load. Cut and automate first. Then add up the Move bucket across the whole team.
If the work that doesn’t have a home comes up to 25 or more hours a week, and it’s the same kind of work, then boom, you have your job description. Write it from that list, not from some random template you found online. If it’s less than 25 hrs or just tasks scattered across five different areas, then you don’t need a hire… yet. You first need to reshuffle some of the tasks among your current team and look for another automation/tool you can implement.
Truth is… sometimes the answer really is to hire. I’m not going to talk you out of a hire you need. I just want the person you bring on to walk into a defined job, not a pile of everybody’s leftovers.
(If you read August’s issue on how hiring five people creates thirty-five new handoffs, this is the step that comes before that math. Every undefined task you hand a new person becomes a broken handoff.)
What this one costs
Here’s the math, with round numbers.
One person on your team earns $60,000, which is roughly $29 an hour. If eight hours of their week lands in the Move or Cut buckets, that’s about $12,000 a year of their salary spent on work that isn’t theirs. Across a team of five, it’s $60,000.
That’s the hire you were about to budget for. They are already on your payroll.
Now compare it to hiring into undefined work. A $55,000 salary runs closer to $70,000 or more once you add taxes, benefits, and equipment. Then there are three to six months of ramp just to get the person up to speed and comfortable within your team. Don’t have full-time hires yet? Well, imagine running up a freelancer’s bill with an extra 20 – 30 hrs a month because you keep expanding the scope and responsibilities.
If the job wasn’t clear when they started, you risk paying all of that and losing them anyway.
Before you close this — Run the sorting activity with one person on your team. Reply and tell me which bucket was biggest. If it was Clarify, you’re in very good company.
P.S. Bring your Move bucket to the GSD Weekend, November 7–8. By Sunday night, we’ll build the system for one piece of it, in your own account. The waitlist is open now, and registration opens October 26. And if your Cut or Automate bucket filled up fast, watch The AI Mastermind: Using AI to Scale Your Small Business Operations on the GSD YouTube channel. It shows what to hand to AI before you hand it to a new hire.
— Georgie-Ann, your Ops Bestie
GSD Solutions works with Owners and Operators to audit, automate, and update the systems they outgrew. If you want a second set of eyes on yours, that’s what the 90-minute evaluation is for. Book yours today at gsdsolutionsinc.com/letstalk
