How to hire the right person next in your business

Executive overview

Most entrepreneurs hire to add capacity, but end up drowning in management overhead. The real goal is to hire to buy back time — freeing yourself for high-value work.

The Next Hire Focuser framework gives you a repeatable system to identify who to hire, score the options, and avoid the mistakes that make new hires fail.

The four questions to identify your next hire

• Where are your low value time suckers — tasks you could pay someone little to handle?
• If you tripled revenue next month, what parts of the business would break? Hire ahead of bottlenecks.
• What is your greatest strength? That is your curse of the gifted — the last thing you'll delegate, and the biggest constraint to scale.
• Where is the friction in growth: acquiring customers, retaining them, or increasing revenue per customer?

Score your hire options

Rate each candidate role 1–3 across three criteria:

• Will it make money? A salesperson scores 3; an executive assistant scores 1.
• How much time will it save you (as CEO, not the business)? An EA can score 3; other roles may score lower.
• How affordable is it? Weigh full-time local hire vs. outsourced or offshore options.

Add the scores. The highest total is your next hire.

Three mistakes to avoid

• Single-role thinking — hire one person who can wear two or three hats; consolidate before you specialise.
• No onboarding plan — document the first two weeks before making the offer; don't rely on yourself to train them.
• Not letting go — give new hires full access and full ownership; push them into the deep end, coach on mistakes, don't micromanage.