3 Telltale Signs It’s Time To Hire

In the early days, founders grow accustomed to running lean –the bootstrapping mentality is hardwired into their brain. When operating lean comes out of necessity, you learn how to curate the right mix of employees to establish and fit into a winning company culture while working to reach lofty goals. It’s a delicate art, one that can present constant new challenges for executives as the business grows.

The fact of the matter is, to achieve growth in your business you have to grow your team. But how do you know when it’s the right time to hire? Here are a few ways to tell if it’s time to start lining up the interviews.

Balance needs to be restored

There’s a fine line between being challenged and being overwhelmed with work. The fact of the matter is, there will always be “overload” in a fast-paced, growth company, but the goal is to find harmony in life (personal, work and family).

Be careful with the term “balance,” however. It can be easy to believe you are always failing, where harmony is more about finding happiness in all you do. It supports making the daily transitions from personal to work to family.

Working over 50 hours a week can be to the detriment of your team and your company only when your people don’t find happiness and harmony in work, family and life. The culture you create will most certainly shape this, but so too will your hiring practices and how well you’ve built sustainable systems within the business.

In many cases, you will need to lead by example, but also talk to employees on a regular basis about the quality of life they feel they’re able to achieve overall. If work is absorbing all of the space in their lives, it may be a sign it’s time to expand the team so productivity, mindfulness in their work, and happiness doesn’t take a hit.

Of course, you also want to be smart about hiring and when you’re unsure if the work is going to be there down the road, this puts you in a vulnerable state. This is particularly challenging for service-based businesses –timing project workload with hiring. One way to avoid getting the company into hot water is to have sustainable systems in place –and that often starts with visibility.

Ability to deliver consistently is slipping

If your team is spending all of their energy just getting work out the door instead of proactively going the extra mile to produce great work, then you might lack the people power to reach your full potential. It’s a common pattern among scaling businesses –business picks up, the team cranks up their output, putting in longer hours, yet you constantly feel you’re in reactionary mode rather than proactively anticipating the needs of your customers.

Getting into this pattern often leads to employees becoming box checkers rather than being mindful and strategic about the task at hand. Ultimately you want to reach a point in which you’re able to maintain a sustainable state of innovation, strategic thinking and quality delivered to your customers. Your team can only do that when they have the space to be mindful about their work.

How do you find the Sustainability? You have to reach a point in which revenue is repeatable and predictable, and you’re able to deliver consistently.

This is a sustainable state and it has three primary components. The first is visibility — insight into all key metrics, such as how allocated are your people, revenue waterfall, customer churn, etc.

The second is repeatability. Can you repeat a certain type of sale and organizational delivery process?

And finally, predictability. Can you predict the flow of revenue, sales cycles, and customer retention? When you have better insights into these three variables of sustainability, you can be more mindful with hiring.

You can’t afford not to hire

With the three above variables in place, you can make calculated bets that reallocating your employees will free them up to innovate more. You’re adding another brick to the foundation.

Don’t just look at the costs associated with a new hire. Take inventory of the opportunity costs of not bringing on that new person. Will the extra support enable you to get to a more sustainable model faster and help the organization fulfill its vision and purpose?

Hiring a new employee is not a decision to take lightly or execute haphazardly. However, with the right insights, you’ll be able to make more calculated, mindful moves. Keep in mind, the ultimate goal is sustainability through harmony.