Season 17 | Ep 201 | Hiring Before You’re Ready: When It’s the Right Risk

How do you approach hiring even when you’re not ready and it feels financially uncomfortable? How do you know you’re making a calculated investment in your agency’s future versus just taking a reckless risk? 

In this episode of The Agency Blueprint, I discuss how hiring before you're ready can actually be a strategic growth move, not a reckless one. I explain whether your hiring decision is solving yesterday’s backlog, today’s bottlenecks, or tomorrow’s strategic gaps. 

Don’t miss this episode to learn how to determine whether your hiring need is temporary or ongoing, and how to quantify the associated risk. 

Key Questions: 

• [00:52] Is your hire solving for a real bottleneck that’s holding back future growth? 
• [04:05] Are you hiring to fix yesterday’s overload, today’s bandwidth, or tomorrow’s opportunity? 
• [07:32] Is the risk you're considering actually a smart one that leads to measurable ROI? 

What You’ll Discover:  

• [01:50] The importance of building a fiscal framework to remove any hiring fear and uncertainty. 
• [03:11] Practical tools for calculating the worst-case scenario of a hire and how to frame the financial loss vs. opportunity cost. 
• [04:05] Three hiring motivations buckets—yesterday’s problem, today’s need, and tomorrow’s growth. 
• [05:43] How strategic hires can directly impact long-term growth by solving deeper client retention or upsell issues. 
• [07:32] How to evaluate whether your hiring decision solves a meaningful strategic need and has direct revenue potential. 
• [10:41] Why you should have at least two months of operational expenses in reserve, beyond the cost of the new hire. 
• [11:25] The importance of defining what success looks like and deciding now how you’ll evaluate ROI. 
• [12:29] Why the hire should know exactly what they're walking into and what success means from day one. 
• [14:04] Why hiring with a clear plan and intention can be exactly what your agency needs even before you’re fully ready.