Hiring for Scale
You're hiring to "take things off your plate." Six months later you're spending 10 hours a week in syncs. The hire didn't scale you—it added a dependency. Hiring for scale is building a team designed to handle growth: clear role definition, documentation, and systems. It's different from hiring to replace yourself; it's hiring so the system has capacity, and you've written down how the system works before the person arrives.
Same hire, different preparation. Without systems: the new ops person waits for decisions you've never written down; you re-explain every week. With systems: there's a runbook. They know where to find the process, the template, the rule. You do the exception handling and the weekly review—2 hours instead of 10. Hiring for scale means the person can run the process without you in the loop for every step. That requires SOPs and documentation first.
Build repeatable processes first, then add people. Otherwise you'll spend more time explaining than doing.
How to hire for scale
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Document before you hire. What will they do? What's the process? Where do they escalate? Get the runbook in place so the hire has a script. If you don't, you become the bottleneck for managing them.
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Define the role. Not "help with operations" but "own intake, scheduling, and invoice follow-up using these three runbooks." Clear scope so they're not waiting for you to decide everything.
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Design for leverage. The hire should free more of your time than they consume. If you're spending 15 hours a week managing them, the design is wrong. Reduce that through better documentation and clearer boundaries.