The 5 Hires You Do Not Need Yet

Read time: 4 mins

Welcome back, everyone 👋

This week's Automation Playbook covers:

🧩 The 5 roles founders try to hire for too early

🔍 How to tell whether a role is really a workflow

📋 What to build before adding headcount

Let's get into it 👇

August has a way of doing two things at once.

It slows you down. And it makes you think.

Yesterday, on one of the hottest days of the year, I hired a canal boat with my family to celebrate my sister's birthday.

We tootled up and down the Avon. No agenda. No signal. The kind of pace that feels almost offensive when you are used to moving fast.

And somewhere between the second lock and a very warm can of something cold, I found myself staring at the water and thinking about my business.

Not the tasks. Not the to-do list. The direction.

Where are we actually heading? What does the org chart need to look like in two years? What would I need to stop doing personally for the business to get there?

It was not the first time I had asked those questions this week. On Tuesday evening, I won Entrepreneur of the Month at my local EC meeting.

The questions that earned it were not complicated ones. They were the same ones.

Where are you heading? What is your vision? What would your org chart need to look like?

Simple. But most of us do not stop long enough to answer them properly.

August is the month when founders accidentally do. The slower pace creates space that a normal working week does not.

So this edition is about one of the things that came up in my own thinking on the river.

Because when you ask where the business is heading, one of the first things you reach for is headcount. More people, more capacity, more momentum.

And sometimes that is exactly right.

But sometimes what looks like a hiring problem is actually a systems problem. And hiring into it makes everything slower, not faster.

Here is how to tell the difference.

The 5 hires founders reach for too early

There are five roles I see founders reach for again and again before the system underneath them exists.

1. The coordinator

Hired to keep everyone aligned.

They chase updates, ask where things are up to, and remind people what they already agreed to do.

What to build instead:

• Clear ownership on every task

• Automatic nudges when something is stuck

• One shared place where everyone can see progress

If the coordinator's main job is asking "any update on this?", you do not have a coordination problem.

You have a visibility problem.

2. The reporting person

Hired to pull numbers together into something readable.

They download the CSV, clean the spreadsheet, copy the chart, and rewrite the same summary every Friday.

What to build instead:

• Data pulled from live sources

• A dashboard that updates automatically

• Exceptions flagged for human commentary

If the report is the same shape every week, a person should not be rebuilding it from scratch every week.

3. The onboarding hire

Hired to walk every new client through the same sequence.

Send the welcome email. Request the same assets. Book the same call. Chase the same missing information.

What to build instead:

• A triggered onboarding sequence

• A client checklist that shows what is missing

• Internal tasks created automatically

If onboarding depends on someone remembering what comes next, the business is not onboarding clients.

It is hoping.

4. The follow-up hire

Hired to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Prospects. Clients. Suppliers. Internal actions. All living in someone’s head, inbox, or Slack messages.

What to build instead:

• CRM reminders based on actual activity

• Stale-opportunity alerts

• Next-step prompts after calls

If the business needs a person just to remember who needs chasing, follow-up has no system.

5. The admin support hire

Hired to handle the repetitive back-office work.

Forms. Approvals. Document generation. Data entry. Copying information between tools.

What to build instead:

• Intake forms that capture clean data once

• Routing rules that send work to the right place

• Templates that generate standard documents

If the task has the same rules every time, it should not live permanently on a human to-do list.

Nugget #1: Before you hire the role, split the job spec into tasks. If most of it is routing, reminding, reporting, or reconciling, build the workflow first.

The job spec test

Here is the test I would run before adding any operations-heavy hire.

Break the job description into three buckets.

Judgement: tasks where a person needs to interpret context, make a call, manage a relationship, or spot nuance.

Keep these human.

Workflow: tasks that follow a sequence.

Request this. Check that. Update this field. Notify that person. Send the next step.

Build these into the system.

Waste: tasks that only exist because the current process is messy.

Duplicate data entry. Manual chasing. Reformatting reports. Searching for information. Asking who owns what.

Remove these completely if you can.

This is where the hiring conversation usually changes.

The role that looked like a full-time hire often turns into a workflow, dashboard, handoff, or smaller senior role focused on judgement.

This is not about replacing good people with software.

It is about not hiring good people into bad systems.

Nugget #2: A good hire should add judgement, relationships, and momentum. If they are mostly adding memory, chasing, and manual transfer, the system is not ready for them yet.

A real example of unbundling a headcount plan

A client came to us with a headcount plan for the next quarter.

Three new hires, all justified by growth.

On paper, it looked reasonable.

More clients. More moving parts. More work to coordinate.

But when we mapped the roles, one was mostly chasing client inputs, one was mostly compiling status updates, and one was mostly making sure onboarding steps happened in the right order.

Almost all of it was repeatable.

The work was moving between the same three places: the CRM, the delivery board, and email.

Nothing was particularly complex.

It was just badly connected.

So we built the workflow instead:

• Client requests routed automatically to the right person with full context

• Status updates generated from existing project data

• Onboarding steps triggered in sequence, with missing items flagged early

The result?

• Two of the three planned hires were no longer needed

• The one hire that remained became more senior and more useful

• The team felt less stretched without adding three extra salaries

Growth still happened.

It just did not need three people standing in the gaps between systems.

Nugget #3: The question is not "can we afford this hire?" The better question is "which parts of this role should not be a role at all?"

What you can do this week

Take every role currently sitting on your "we need to hire" list.

For each one, ask:

• What would this person do every Monday morning?

• Which tasks repeat every week?

• Which tasks are just chasing, checking, copying, or coordinating?

• Which parts genuinely require judgement?

• What workflow would make the role smaller, sharper, or unnecessary?

You might still hire.

Sometimes you absolutely should.

But you will hire for the right reason.

Not because information is stuck.

Not because reminders are being forgotten.

Not because three tools do not talk to each other.

Because there is genuinely human work to do.

The businesses that scale cleanly are not the ones who hire fastest.

They are the ones who know the difference between a person-shaped problem and a workflow-shaped one.

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help:

• You can check out the latest episode of the Ctrl Alt Dev podcast, where I break down what's working right now in detail with my co-host Sean Sale: Apple | Spotify | YouTube

• Need a fresh perspective? I’m here to help. Book a free audit call with me, and we’ll figure it out together.