The Conversation That Started with My Wife

See Original Forbes Business Council Article

A few years into building Solpak, I was having the same conversation with my wife again.

She asked why I was still at the office. I had no good answer.

Then she said something that stopped me cold. “When you first started out, you used to tell me how you were going to create a business that really stood out. The kind that nobody else could match. Perhaps that's what's missing.”

She was not talking about hiring. She was talking about building something that could stand on its own.

At that point, I had been hiring for a while. Every new hire was supposed to take work off my plate. Every new hire had somehow put more work on it. More coordination. More questions coming back to me. More of my time.

That is when I understood something I had been avoiding.

I was not hiring into a business. I was hiring into my own overwhelm.

A business that depends on the uniqueness of its people rather than the quality of its processes is one resignation away from a crisis. Most founders know this. Most do nothing about it because the building process feels slow when clients are waiting and deadlines are real. It is the most expensive delay in business.

That conversation started a long rebuilding process. I stopped hiring to solve today's problem. I started building the infrastructure first, then hiring into it.

Forbes published the full piece today in the Forbes Business Council series, under the title What Nobody Tells You About Your First Hire.

Your next hire should make you less essential, not more. If you are not sure that is true, the problem is not who you are hiring. It is what you are hiring them into.