Almost ten years ago I made my first hire.
Looking back, I can still hear the story I was telling myself at the time: it’s easier if I just do it. I just need a little more time. I’ll figure it out. I can handle this.
The truth is, I could. That was the problem. Most founders are capable of an enormous amount. We push through, wear five hats at once, work nights and weekends, and for a while, it actually works.
Then one day I noticed my weekdays were ending at 8pm and I was working most Saturdays, and somewhere in there the business had quietly become my entire life.
That was my breaking point, and it wasn’t dramatic. There wasn’t a blown deadline or a missed revenue number I could point to. I just realized, plainly, that I didn’t want that life.
I knew I needed help.
But hiring felt risky in a way that was hard to admit out loud. What if I made the wrong call? Spending weeks onboarding someone only for it not to work out would put me right back where I started, except poorer and further behind.
So I kept telling myself the same line. It’s easier if I just do it.
Ten years later, as I coach agency owners, I find it interesting how often I see this pattern show up again and again, just at different stages.
It’s rarely about whether someone is capable of leading because almost everyone I work with is.
It’s about the story they’re telling themselves in the moment, and that story is what keeps them from getting support earlier than they need to.
It shows up at the first hire but it also shows up in the third, or the fifth, or the first real leadership hire. The excuses always sound reasonable, things like needing to get through a busy season first, or needing to document processes before bringing someone in, or simply not having time to train anyone right now.
The underlying pattern is the same one I lived.
This isn’t a case for building a massive team.
I believe in small but mighty agencies, the kind that stay lean on purpose. I’ve come alongside agency owners to help build exactly that kind of team.
Staying small and mighty doesn’t mean carrying everything yourself. It just means being deliberate about who joins the team and when, whether that’s your first hire, your third, your fifth, or the leadership hire that finally lets you step back from the day to day.
Doing it yourself is almost always easier, at least for a while. But every time we choose what’s easier today, we’re also choosing the life that comes with it.
For me, that life looked like 8pm weekdays and lost Saturdays, and once I could see it clearly, I knew I wanted something different.
Hiring wasn’t easy. Learning how to hire wasn’t easy either.
Building a team is hard but doing everything yourself is hard too.
At some point, you have to choose which hard you want.
If you’re curious what actually got me unstuck, I wrote the longer version on my Substack.
