Listen instead on your Monday Morning Drive:

I recently spent two weeks on a cruise ship above the Arctic Circle. Dozens of short dinner conversations with strangers, most of them retired or semi-retired, kept revealing a recurring pattern: When I asked what they used to do for a living, so many of them turned out to be accidental entrepreneurs.

One couple from England stands out. He became a part-owner of the engineering firm he’d worked at for years. She owned her own travel agency business.

Neither set out to run a company. They found themselves in the position, made the best of it, and came out comfortable.

That’s the story for a lot of us in AV and live events. We didn’t plan on this. Customers, coworkers, or family pushed us into it. The decisions we make now shape whether we grow or stall out as accidental owners.

The single most important decision we keep getting wrong is how we staff the business.

The Wrong Hire Solves the Wrong Problem

Every week, a client calls me and says some version of the same request: “We need to hire someone!” 

Sales is falling behind. An RFP came in and nobody can handle it. Growth is outpacing capacity. The answer in their head is another warm body.

Then I ask what they’re willing to spend. The response is usually “entry level, maybe $40,000–$50,000.”

“You didn’t give me an entry-level problem,” I reply. “Your sales organization is stuck, and we don’t fix sales organizations from the bottom up. We fix them from the top. Who’s your sales leader? Why haven’t they fixed it yet?

“The right answer starts with a sales leader, not a junior hire.”

It’s Only Expensive if the Problem Isn’t Valuable

When I tell a client they need a $120,000–$180,000 hire, the first words out of their mouth are almost always the same: “That’s expensive.”

Expensive compared to what?

If your problem is worth solving, no reasonable hire is too expensive. If the problem isn’t worth that much, you don’t have the problem you think you do. The math works one way or the other.

I’ve had an owner complain about $5,000 to truck gear to Orlando, then turn around and spend $50,000 on a new video projector or $200,000 on an LED wall without flinching. The trucking wasn’t expensive. The owner just didn’t connect the expense to its value.

Your pricing has to reflect the value you create. So does your hiring.

Manpower Is Cheap. Brainpower Is the Investment.

Manpower is a commodity. Boots on the ground, neck-down labor, warm bodies. It’s valuable when it’s properly trained, properly led, and properly focused.

The question is who’s doing the training, the leading, and the focusing. That’s brainpower, and it’s the part most companies try to skip.

Plugging a process or leadership gap with manpower looks cheap on a P&L. It isn’t. It’s kicking the can down the road and paying a little every month until the business cracks.

A scalable business operates with fewer people who are twice as smart as the average hire.

Data, Facts, Decisions

Three inputs separate the owners who move forward from the ones who stay stuck: data, facts, and decisions.

Data is unemotional. You took in $100,000 in talent revenue and spent $110,000 procuring that talent, so you lost money. That’s data.

What does it tell you? Either you’re charging too little or paying too much. A quick look at the market tells you which one.

The instant emotion hits the data, decision-making falls apart. A salesperson says, “Our clients won’t pay for that,” and the room caves in.

That’s not data. That’s conjecture. The client relationship is being held hostage by the salesperson’s feelings.

Facts reduce conjecture. If you’ve done real research with your clients, surveyed them, presented pricing models, and gathered responses, you have facts. Without that work, you’re working from opinion. Knowing the difference between data and feelings is where good leadership starts.

Decisions come after data and facts, and they’re the part most teams avoid. Analysis paralysis kicks in, the “that’s too expensive” chorus starts up, and the decision slides into next week.

People who grow profitable businesses make decisions. People who don’t, don’t.

You Already Have the Brain You Need

The most important brain you have is sitting on your shoulders. Use it to look at the data, consider the facts, and make a decision.

The brainpower you add to your company has a different job. It upgrades the team’s output, expands the capacity to see more data, and builds the habit of better decisions over time. A scalable team runs lean and compounds every decision forward.

That doesn’t mean there’s no place for the tactical team. There’s always tactical work to do. If you want to grow, get out of a rut, or take two weeks off to embark on an Arctic cruise without the business falling apart, you have to invest in the brain.

You can get manpower anywhere. The business you want is built on what happens in your brain.