Why Hiring Doesn't Fix Broken Processes

Most founders hit a wall around 10-20 employees. Work is piling up. Deadlines slip. The obvious solution? Hire more people.

But here's what actually happens: you add headcount, and the chaos multiplies. Why? Because you didn't have a people problem. You had a process problem.

The math doesn't lie.

If your team spends 2 hours daily on manual data entry, hiring another person means you now have two people spending 2 hours on data entry. You've doubled your payroll cost for that task-not eliminated it.

Meanwhile, that new hire needs onboarding (manual), creates more communication overhead (manual), and generates more coordination work (also manual).

The pattern I see repeatedly:

• Company hires ops person to handle growing workload
• Ops person inherits broken manual processes
• They become a bottleneck themselves within 6 months
• Company considers hiring another ops person

This cycle burns €40-80k/year per hire while the root problem remains untouched.

What actually fixes it:

Before hiring, audit your workflows. Ask:

• What tasks are repeated daily?
• Where does information get copy-pasted between tools?
• What requires human oversight but not human judgment?

These are automation opportunities. A one-time investment of €2-5k in automation can permanently eliminate work that would otherwise require ongoing salary.

The mindset shift:

Stop thinking "who can do this work?" Start thinking "should this work exist at all?"

The best companies I work with hire for judgment, creativity, and relationships-not for tasks that software should handle.

Your next hire should expand your capacity for things machines can't do. Everything else? Automate it first.