Ok, not ALL hiring is lazy but most of it can and should be delayed for as long as possible in early-stage companies.
People are a headache for startups. More people means more meetings, more complexity, more diversions in a time where companies cannot afford any of that.
Most importantly, with more people too early in a company’s life, things that should get automated simply don’t. They get done by people and then those things that should be automated become a human-led process and part of the DNA of the company. Then that thing becomes a responsibility and then it becomes too unwieldy for one person and a team is formed around it.
This happens all the time in all the startups I’ve ever been a part of. At Trexity, we did what every startup does in the early days: roll up our sleeves and make everything manual. We would do the things that could not scale until we could automate and then we would forget. These manual processes would become an SOP, built into the fabric of the company and part of someone’s job. Then we would hire people to do that job because the team was overwhelmed. It’s a vicious, expensive cycle that balloons as you scale.
We hired a support team to keep operations running. They managed routes. Assigned bonuses to couriers. Manually called drivers to fill gaps. Every day, hands on keyboards, making it work.
The problem is that it worked. So well that senior leadership had no idea what was actually happening. We thought the system was running. It wasn’t. People were running it. They thought it was their job. Because it was — we made it their job by hiring them to do it instead of building the system to do it for them.
The rest of the company thought we were killing it. Operations looked smooth. Deliveries were getting done. But underneath, we had a team doing work that should have been a script, a button, an automated process.
By the time we realized it, the manual process was baked in. It wasn’t a workaround anymore. It was an SOP. It was someone’s responsibility. It was in the DNA of how we operated.
Early in the life of a startup every single person on payroll should be bouncing between 90-100% utilization. The difference between 90% and 100% is automation. Only when the company has automated all that it can should it hire for the next phase.
One of my early co-founders said it succinctly: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could run this company with just the founders?” That should be the goal for as long as possible.