One of the most popular questions I’m asked is, “How do I know when to hire?”

Understandably, owners don’t want to waste money by hiring when they don’t really need to OR by hiring people for the wrong positions. This happens a lot more than you’d think.

If you don’t want it to happen to you, keep reading.

Why Owners Ask About Hiring

The main reason owners ask me about hiring is that they have a pain point with throughput in their selling and delivery process, and their team is asking for more help.

The problem is that sometimes the help the team is asking for isn’t the help they really need. Adding more throughput resources doesn’t necessarily increase throughput. Other constraints play a role.

In other words, throughput problems aren’t solved by simply adding more people. Adding more techs to the team so you can crew shows easier, for example, isn’t going to solve your real problem.

When owners ask me about hiring, it’s an indicator that these underlying constraints exist. And the solutions may not be immediately obvious.

What owners need to ask is, “How do I internally scale my business profitably?”

Owners should hire if their external business is growing and there’s demand they can fulfill. But there are two specific positions to hire for that bring the greatest benefit and possibility for growth.

If your external business is growing, the first thing you need to do is hire more project managers to increase your delivery capacity.

Then, when you’ve increased your delivery capacity, you can hire more salespeople to keep your project managers busy.

What you don’t need is more admins or bookkeepers. Project managers and salespeople can double or triple the size of your business, assuming you’ve mastered procurement and growing your supply chain isn’t an issue.

Hire Project Managers to Increase Capacity

You do need to hire more project managers (PMs), but if you just hire more people to do the same thing, you’re overlooking the constraints inherent in your processes.

Often, PMs help quote the job, and then they help do the job. Some PMs have specific knowledge and are therefore irreplaceable in the proposal process, but they get tied up in other parts of the job.

Scenarios like this reduce overall capacity and constrain the sales process.

The practice of using all PMs the same way — even though their skills and talents are not the same — creates constraints. Some project managers are extremely helpful in the selling process, some are helpful in the planning process, and some are helpful in the delivery process.

The trick is, they don’t all have to be the same person.

Why not have some PMs who are excellent at developing proposals and budgets, and other PMs who manage delivery processes? Instead of having one long project management process fulfilled by one individual — and creating a role that’s almost impossible to fill adequately — break the process down so you have more options for hiring and more capacity for quoting.

Having project managers specifically dedicated to the quoting process will ease constraints and greatly increase the capacity of your sales team.

Hire More Salespeople to Handle the Increase

When you find that you have more demand, it’s time to hire more salespeople. Why? Because you now know how to create more capacity for that demand through strategic project management.

When strategically adding project management increases your throughput, you need salespeople to process the demand. Then you just keep adding salespeople until all demand is consistently met.

Every business has a metric unique for this. I don’t know what it is for your business. I do know there’s a maximum amount a salesperson of a certain caliber can handle in terms of volume. Maybe it’s a million dollars, maybe it’s ten million.

If all of your salespeople are working at capacity, then you’re out of salespeople. Adding more salespeople will increase your overall capacity to filter demand, provided the demand is there.

Trust the Process

When you have more capacity with project managers who concentrate on the sales process, your salespeople will get more orders into the system. Now you just need project managers to plan the execution of those orders.

Here’s the added bonus: those next project managers don’t necessarily have to be full-time staff. You very well might be able to outsource to, say, a production company.

In this way, you can reduce the amount of overhead by creating a process that’s transferable to a supplier.

Isn’t that an elegant way to do business? It’s also more profitable.