I’ve been thinking about something since my last post about hiring in this market.
A few people reached out and said basically the same thing: “Clint, that sounds great, but I can’t afford those kinds of strategic hires right now.”
I get it. When I wrote “strategic hire,” a lot of you read that as “expensive senior position.”
Strategic ≠ expensive
A strategic hire is just someone who helps you get time back to focus on what matters most. That’s it.
For a lot of franchise operators, a strategic hire might be a part-time bookkeeper. Or someone to handle scheduling and customer service so you can actually focus on growing the business.
Those aren’t necessarily expensive hires. But they are strategic hires because they get you unstuck.
The DIY trap
I’ll use myself as an example. I have an accounting degree, so when I started CareerPlug I convinced myself I needed to manage the books myself. I was “saving money.”
Except I wasn’t.
I was spending hours every week on reconciliations and reports when I should have been building the business. Hiring someone to handle the books, even part time, made me money in the long run because I could finally focus on work that actually mattered.
This is the type of leap every franchise owner needs to make if you want to get to the next level.
The four levels
In The Franchise People Playbook, I wrote about franchise growth as four levels:
Level 1: You do almost everything yourself
Level 2: You manage everyone directly while still working in the business
Level 3: You manage managers and have systems running daily operations
Level 4: The business runs without your day-to-day involvement
You can’t skip levels. I wish you could, but you can’t.
A franchisee can’t hire a GM or an operations director when there aren’t any managers on the team yet. And you can’t hire managers when you’re still spending 30 hours a week doing bookkeeping and answering phones.
So what’s keeping you stuck?
Look at last week’s calendar. How many hours did you spend on tasks someone else could do?
Not strategic decisions or relationship building. I’m talking about data entry, scheduling, routine customer calls, processing payroll. Maybe you’re even still providing services directly to clients yourself.
Pick one thing you could hand off tomorrow. For me, it was bookkeeping. For you, it might be something different that helps you get some time back.
Do the math differently
Your strategic hire might work 15 hours a week, a few afternoons handling your administrative backlog. We’re talking $1,500 to $2,000 a month to buy back 20 hours of your time every month.
Maybe that’s not a comfortable cost. But can you afford to keep doing everything yourself while your business stays stuck at its current size?
It’s never going to feel completely safe, but you didn’t jump into the entrepreneurial life to play it safe. And staying stuck is almost always more expensive than moving forward.
More next Monday,
Clint
P.S. You can download a free copy of The Franchise People Playbook here.