I’m writing this from the middle of packing boxes.
At the end of this month, I’m moving to a new city. Fresh start, new energy, new chapter. And if you’ve ever moved before, you know that the temptation is to do everything at once. Buy all the furniture before you’ve seen the space. Decorate before you know the layout. Plan dinner parties before you even have a couch.
It’s exciting. And it’s also how you end up overwhelmed, overspent, and surrounded by things that don’t actually fit.
Starting a business is exactly the same. And the hiring decisions founders make in the early days? They follow the same pattern. Excitement, urgency, and a long list of people they want on the team before the foundation is even set.
This one is for the founders who are just getting started, or who started recently and already feel like they’re drowning even though things are going well on paper. Because the way you build your team at the beginning matters more than most people realize.
Here is something I see constantly. A founder launches, gets some traction, and suddenly the to-do list feels impossible to handle alone. So they start making a mental list of everyone they need.
A virtual assistant.
A social media manager.
A copywriter.
A project manager.
A customer service rep.
Maybe a graphic designer too.
Oh, and someone to handle their email.
All of this before they have systems. Before they have processes. Before they have any documented way of doing things.
The intention is good. The timing is the problem.
When you hire too many people too soon, without the right structure in place, you do not multiply your output. You multiply your mayhem. Suddenly you are managing people instead of building your business. You are answering questions that should have been answered by a process document that does not exist yet. You are paying for hours that are not converting into results because nobody, including you, is clear on what success looks like.
Revenue starts leaking. Not because your people are bad. But because the foundation was not ready for a team.
So who should you actually bring on in the beginning? This is where founders get it wrong most often, because they hire for their own comfort instead of for business function.
The first hire should almost always be someone who protects your time and keeps things organized. A good executive assistant or operations-minded VA who can manage your calendar, handle communications, keep your tasks from falling through the cracks, and give you back the mental bandwidth to actually run things. Not someone to hand tasks off to randomly, but someone who actively helps you stay on top of your own business.
The second thing you need, before you hire anyone else, is someone to set up your systems. This is the part people skip and then regret. Before you bring on a social media manager, your content workflow needs to exist. Before you bring on a customer service person, your client journey needs to be documented. Before you bring on a project manager, your projects need to be organized somewhere. Hiring without systems is like bringing a new employee into a house that has no furniture and telling them to make themselves comfortable.
The first team members set the culture and the standard. If they walk into chaos, they either adapt to the chaos (which makes things worse) or they leave quickly because they cannot function in it. Either way, you lose.
This is the part nobody wants to hear because it is less exciting than hiring. But it is what separates businesses that scale smoothly from ones that constantly feel like they are on the verge of falling apart.
Before you bring on more than one or two people, you want to make sure a few things are in place.
You need a central hub where everything lives. One place where your team knows to go for tasks, updates, files, and communication. It does not matter whether that is Notion, ClickUp, Asana, or a well-organized Google Drive. What matters is that it exists, it is set up properly, and everyone is actually using it.
You need documented processes for the things that happen regularly. How do you onboard a new client? What happens when someone books a call? How do you handle invoicing? How do invoices get sent and followed up on? These do not need to be complicated. A simple Loom video or a one-page Google Doc is enough. But they need to exist so that you are not the answer to every single question.
You need clarity on what each person is responsible for. Not a vague job title. Actual clarity on what they own, what decisions they can make independently, and how their work connects to the bigger picture.
When these things are in place, every new hire you bring on gets up to speed faster, costs you less time, and actually delivers results.
Here is the part that stings a little. Hiring without a plan does not just cost you time and energy. It costs you money.
A disorganized team is expensive. Duplicated work is expensive. Onboarding someone who quits in three months because they had no clarity is expensive. Missed client deliverables because nobody owned the process are expensive. And perhaps most costly of all, a founder who is so deep in managing people that they have stopped selling and growing is a very expensive situation.
The early stage of your business is when every dollar and every hour counts the most. The founders who treat that stage with intention, who resist the urge to hire everyone at once and instead build deliberately, are the ones who look back a year later and actually feel proud of what they built.
The ones who hired fast and prayed? They usually end up having to reset. Sometimes more than once.
When I move into my new place, I am not buying everything at once. I am going to analyze the space first. Figure out what it needs. Prioritize what is essential for day one, what can wait for week two, and what I do not actually need at all. That is the only way to settle into somewhere new without losing your mind.
Your business deserves the same approach. Analyze the business. Understand what it needs. Bring in the right people for the right reasons at the right time.
Because a well-set-up business with a small, focused team will always outperform a chaotic one with ten people running in different directions.
If you are in that season right now where things are growing but the backend feels messy, you are not sure who to hire next, and you really just need someone to look at the whole picture with you and tell you the truth about what they see, that is exactly what my Ops Strategy Intensive is for.
It is a 90-minute session where we dig into your operations, your team setup, your workflows, and your priorities. You walk away with a clear roadmap of what to fix first, what to stop doing, and what your actual next moves should be. No vague advice, no hour spent just explaining your business.
If that sounds like what you need right now, you can book your session here.
And if you are still figuring things out, stick around. There is a lot more where this came from.
