What Hiring Is Really Costing You (Hint: It's Not the Salary)

So here is something I have been sitting with since my conversation with Eric Dingler on episode 195 of Surviving the Side Hustle.

Eric runs a digital marketing agency while traveling the world full-time with his wife and four teenagers. They have lived in 55 apartments across 20 countries over the last four years. He has not logged into a client's website in three years. He has not checked his own email in even longer.

And his business kept growing.

Now, the first instinct most people have when they hear that is to ask what tool he uses, or what system he built, or how big his team is. Those are fair questions. But they are the wrong starting point. The real starting point is a mindset shift, and Eric put it plainly in our conversation.

"It's not about how much it's going to cost you to hire somebody. It's about how much it's costing you not hiring them."

That one lands differently when you actually sit with it.

The feast-or-famine trap nobody talks about

Eric started his web design business as a side hustle to fund a debt-free international adoption. He needed $50,000. He knew how to build websites. Simple enough.

But pretty quickly he ran into the wall almost every service provider hits. When he was busy building a website, he had no time to go find the next one. When that project wrapped, the pipeline was dry. Classic feast or famine.

His fix before he hired anyone was to solve the revenue consistency problem first. He added recurring monthly maintenance plans so clients were paying him every month to manage and report on their sites. Three months later, he had enough predictable revenue to commit to his first hire, two hours a week, remote, from Bulgaria. That person is now his Director of Web Services, six years later.

The lesson there is worth slowing down on. He did not hire his way out of the feast-or-famine cycle. He fixed the cycle, then hired. The hire was sustainable because the revenue underneath it was stable.

Gap hires versus team hires

Eric draws a clear line between two types of hiring that most founders blur together, and blurring them is where expectations go sideways.

A gap hire is a freelancer filling a variable need. Eric's designer Max has built every website the agency has produced over the last two years. Some months that is six sites, some months it is two. Max is not in their virtual break room, not at all-staff meetings, not part of the culture being built. He is excellent at his job and that arrangement works perfectly.

A team hire is someone you are developing, delegating client-facing responsibility to, and building culture with. That person needs predictable hours and a commitment you can actually keep.

Knowing which one you actually need before you post anything saves a lot of confusion on both sides.

The step where most founders fall down

Here is where it gets specific, and this is the part I think is most actionable.

Eric says most people recruit okay. The breakdown happens at delegation. You hire someone to take something off your plate, and then you fill those hours with another project instead of revenue-generating work. The hire costs you money, the freed time disappears into busywork, and nothing actually changes.

His rule for the first hire, and really the first four or so:

When you hire someone for 10 hours a week, take eight of those hours and do revenue-generating work only. Not admin. Not a project that felt urgent. Revenue work. Calling past clients for an upsell. Working the pipeline. Whatever actually makes money for your business.

One hour goes toward developing yourself as a leader and developing your new hire. One hour is yours with no agenda.

Do that for four straight weeks and you will have grown your revenue well past what you added to payroll. That is the whole point of the hire.

Unique judgment versus unique knowledge

Eric makes a distinction that I think quietly unlocks a lot of stuck founders.

Most of us tell ourselves we cannot delegate something because we are the only ones who know how to handle it. Eric says that is almost never actually true. What you are really holding onto is unique knowledge, and knowledge can be documented and transferred into a system.

The thing worth protecting is unique judgment. The decisions that genuinely require your read on a situation, your relationships, your context as the owner. Those are rarer than we admit, and they should filter up to you. Everything else is a systems problem, not a people problem.

Eric's agency has 220 SOPs. He personally wrote two of them. One was how to make himself a cup of coffee. The other was how to create an SOP, written while creating the first one. His team built everything else. He was leading them to build it, but they built it.

"Real estate agents don't build the houses they sell," is how his own business coach put it to him. It shifted something for him. It is worth sitting with for a minute.

Leadership is the ceiling

The through line in everything Eric shared is that your leadership capacity sets the ceiling for your business capacity. He treats leadership study as a non-negotiable weekly practice, not something to get to when things slow down. He was doing one hour of CEO time per month when he had his very first two-hour-a-week hire. That grew into CEO days, and eventually into the shape his business has now.

That first hire from Bulgaria who barely knew how to log into WordPress is now his Director of Web Services because of six years of intentional development. That does not happen by accident.

Your one next step

If any of this is hitting close to home, the question worth asking is not "can I afford to hire someone right now." The better question is what is the work you are doing today that someone else could own, and what is staying stuck in that work actually costing you in revenue you are not generating.

If you want to get clearer on where you are actually stuck and which of the six principles needs your attention most right now, go take the free assessment at primeperformancecoaching.com/assess. It takes about five minutes and it will show you exactly where to focus.