Mike runs a $7M commercial landscaping company. Good crews. Steady contracts. Solid reputation.
Last spring he called me with a plan. He wanted to hire two more office coordinators. "We're drowning," he said. "Our scheduling is a mess. Quotes are going out late. Customers are calling me directly because nobody calls them back."
Two coordinators would run him about $120,000 a year once you add benefits and payroll costs. That's real money from his margin.
I didn't argue with him. I asked him to hold off for two weeks and try something first.
In week one, his existing coordinators tracked their time in 30-minute blocks. Nothing fancy. A sheet on the desk. Every block got one of three labels: new work, fixing something, or waiting on someone.
In week two, we sat down with the sheets. Mike expected to see two people buried in scheduling and quotes. That's not what the numbers said.
Less than half their time went to new work. About a third went to fixing things. Re-entering job details from the field. Correcting quotes that went out with the wrong pricing. The rest was waiting. Chasing crew leads for timesheets. Waiting on Mike to sign off on change orders.
Mike's first reaction? "That's just how this business works."
So I asked him one question. "If I gave you two more people tomorrow, what would they do on Monday morning?"
He looked at the sheets for a long time. The answer was right there. They'd do the same fixing and the same waiting. Just more of it.
He wasn't short on people. He was short on a system. He was about to pay $120,000 a year for two people to clean up a mess his business makes every day.
Why this matters right now
Costs are up. Hiring is slow and expensive. Plenty of owners I talk to are holding off on headcount, and they're right to.
But "don't hire" isn't a plan. The work still has to get done. So the question isn't "should I hire?" It's "what am I paying for right now that I shouldn't be?"
Most businesses between $2M and $20M have 15% to 30% of their team's time going to waste. Not because people are lazy. Because the work is badly designed.
Here are the four checks I run before any owner adds a body.
1. Find the rework
Rework is anything done twice. A quote fixed after it went out. A job re-entered from paper into software. An invoice corrected because the field notes were wrong.
Ask your team one question: "What do you fix that someone else should have gotten right?"
Write every answer down. Then put a rough number of hours a week beside each one. Add it up. Don't be surprised if you've found a full-time job's worth of fixing.
2. Find what's waiting on you
This is the one owners hate. In Mike's case, change orders sat for two or three days because he had to approve every one. His coordinators spent hours chasing him. Crews sat idle. Customers got annoyed.
He didn't need more coordinators. He needed to let his ops manager approve anything under $5,000.
If you're the bottleneck, another hire just means one more person standing in line outside your office.
3. Find the expensive people doing cheap work
Look at your best people. Your top estimator. Your ops lead. Your controller.
How much of their week goes to work a $22-an-hour person, or a $50-a-month piece of software, could do? Data entry. Formatting reports. Booking appointments. Following up on unpaid invoices.
When a $90,000 person spends 15 hours a week on $22 work, that's not a staffing gap. That's a misallocation. Fix it before you add to it.
4. Find what you should just stop doing
Every business collects habits. A weekly report nobody reads. A meeting that used to matter. A customer segment that eats time and pays nothing.
Ask: "If we stopped doing this next week, who would notice?"
If the answer is nobody, stop.
What happened with Mike
We spent six weeks on these four checks. No new hires.
He gave his ops manager approval authority. He set up a simple mobile form so crew leads logged job details once, at the job. He killed a Monday meeting that took six people for 90 minutes. He moved invoice follow-up to an automated reminder.
Quotes now go out in one day instead of four. His phone stopped ringing with customer complaints. And his two existing coordinators went from drowning to having room to call customers back.
Nine months later, he did hire. One person. A business development rep to go win more work. That's a hire that makes money instead of one that mops up.
When you should hire
Hiring isn't the enemy. Hiring to cover broken process is.
Hire when the work is clean, the system is clear, and you still can't keep up. Hire when the new person will do something that grows the business, not something that patches it.
If you can't explain exactly what the new person does on day one, and why it can't be fixed another way, you're not ready.
This Week's Move
Pick one of the four checks. Just one. Spend 30 minutes on it with your team.
Then ask yourself the hard one:
Are you short on people, or are you short on the nerve to fix how the work gets done?
Hit reply and tell me which check you ran and what it turned up. I read every response.
Graham Acreman
Business Coach & Strategic Advisor
grahamacreman.com