Before the next hire, establish an operating baseline

More people can create more friction

When requests are delayed, hiring another employee feels like the obvious fix. But if nobody knows who receives a request or what counts as completion, another person can increase handoffs and confusion.

Hiring is a recurring investment, not an automatic remedy for an undefined process.

The root cause may not be capacity

Delays can come from genuine workload, rework caused by missing information, or approvals concentrated with one person. Without data on request volume, cycle time and errors, these causes are easy to confuse.

Understand work allocation, decision rights and required skills before writing the job description.

Test the hire against three questions

Is demand sustained enough to justify a role? Is the process stable enough to train someone into? Will the expected contribution exceed full employment cost, including onboarding and management? If the issue is rework, operational redesign may yield more value.

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• Demand and variability over weeks, not one busy day.
• A capacity bottleneck rather than undefined approval rules.
• A measurable outcome for the proposed role.

Related perspective: Sales Are Up, Cash Is Late: Fix Collections Workflow

Build a two-week baseline

Choose one service and record request count, time, blockers and stage owners. Remove an unnecessary step, document a standard intake and handoff, then compare results. If a real capacity gap remains, define role outputs and authority.

Include total employment cost and assign ownership of onboarding and training.

Hypothetical example: a team requesting another coordinator

Imagine a company receiving twenty requests weekly, with half delayed by incomplete customer details. Hiring another coordinator could move the follow-up burden, while a standard intake form and escalation rule might reduce rework first.

This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer result. Hiring may still be necessary if the measured capacity gap remains.

When does hiring become justified?

Track queue time, first-time completion, overtime and onboarding effort. Set 30-, 60- and 90-day acceptance targets for the role rather than judging activity volume alone.

• Documented sustained demand.
• Responsibilities and authority that can be trained.
• A clear value-versus-cost measure.

A ten-day measurement sheet before hiring

For every incoming request, record its category, start and finish time, waiting time, rework reason, and decision owner. Do not rely only on request counts: separate active work from time spent waiting.

If the dominant loss comes from approvals and duplicate entry, adding headcount may raise cost without materially improving throughput.

Design the venture's capacity before scaling

For new ventures, revenue model, delivery method and critical roles should be defined before fixed payroll grows. These decisions prevent the business from scaling costs ahead of a proven operating model.

Venture Foundation supports the foundational commercial and operating decisions that should precede expansion.

• Measure — Management question
• Backlog trend — Is demand consistently exceeding completed capacity?
• Waiting time — Is the constraint staffing or an approval queue?
• Rework share — Would clearer instructions or training recover capacity first?