If your business is growing, it may be time to look at expanding your team. Here’s how to figure out if it’s time to hire.

Why It’s Time to Hire Before You’re Desperate for Help

As you grow your business, it will likely become essential to add team support. So often, entrepreneurs struggle to identify the right time to hire the help they so desperately need. This contributes to stress, overwhelm, and burnout for owners and team members as well as negatively impacting the trajectory of the business.

It’s tempting to ignore the signs that it’s time to hire as long as possible because it is time-consuming, adds expenses, and is often stressful. But there are some key reasons why it’s detrimental to wait too long for your first or next hire.

Here are a few:

  • If you wait until you’re drowning in work, you’re likely to already be massively behind and overwhelmed when you do hire. This is a terrible time to hire and train — which makes it less likely that you’ll end up with a successful hire.
  • If you’ve needed help for a while, you’re apt to be less discerning when evaluating candidates. This can lead to a bad hire, which will only exacerbate the situation you’re in. Not only will you not get the help you need, but you also will create other problems to deal with.
  • When you wait too long to hire, you often experience missed opportunities along the way that equal lost revenue or growth.

So let’s talk about a different, more useful approach to help you identify quickly when it’s time to hire.

Make a Plan

As you plan out your next 6-12-18 months of business, make sure to consider key milestones that will necessitate additional team members. Consider things like revenue, workload, and your changing role as the business grows.

Look at things, like your industry’s cyclical demands and any personal factors that would require more help. In online business, there are two big launch seasons where it’s pretty common to see an uptick in business: January and September. Do count backward to hire appropriately for any time historically likely to be busy.

Decide how many clients your current team can handle and what additional work will trigger new team needs. Plan for this in advance, so there’s less angst when it’s time to pull the trigger.

Regularly Review Capacity

It’s super easy to miss when you or your team are overwhelmed. In the hustle and bustle of running your business, it’s totally normal to overlook growing to-do lists. But, if you schedule regular capacity reviews for you and your team, you’re more likely to recognize when the need to hire is approaching.

This is one important reason why consistent time tracking is essential to business growth. If you’re easily able to review how your time and your team’s time is spent, you’ll be better prepared for when your workload needs adjusting.

Understanding where the business’ capacity stands also helps you proactively prevent overwhelm, burnout, or the fallout of dropping balls when people are too busy.

Be Prepared Before it’s Time to Hire

Many times when I start working with clients, it’s the first time they’ve considered systematizing or documenting things in their business. Without systems and processes in place, it’s much harder to hire and onboard new team members.

Without the tools to help train someone, you’re either tempted to ignore the signs that it’s time to hire or you’re at a disadvantage when you do.

So, it’s useful to make a consistent effort to document, systematize, and develop processes for the repeatable and necessary tasks involved with running the business.

If you don’t have anything in place yet, start small. Look at things you do over and over again — like blog posts, lead follow-up, or client onboarding. Shoot for creating one system per week, or even one per month, if that’s all time allows. With slow and steady progress, you’ll build the resources to help make new hires more effective and helpful in a shorter time frame.

Worried about making common hiring mistakes? Check out this post for tips!

Focus on Development

While keeping an eye on when a new hire will be needed, it’s also useful to keep the training and development of your existing team in mind. All too often, we get caught up in bringing in someone new before we fully determine if there’s an existing team member we may want to step up. Whether it’s transferable skills or a desire for more responsibility, you may have the answer to a hiring need already on your team.

Of course, you can’t always promote from within or train someone for additional duties; however, it doesn’t hurt to consider if it’s appropriate when it’s time to hire for a new role. Investing in the skills of your team helps you — and it helps them — if it’s something they want.

Prevent Overwhelm by Recognizing When it’s Time to Hire

Overwhelm and burnout are two things that can doom your performance, so keeping the focus on strategies to avoid them is a helpful way to improve overall effectiveness and productivity. (If you’re already struggling with burnout, be sure to check out this post.)

As the leader of your business, you hold the keys to growth and effectiveness. Identifying when it’s time to hire is an essential tool in this pursuit!

If your business is growing, it may be time to look at expanding your team. Here’s how to figure out if it’s time to hire.