What Is It Costing You to Not Hire Someone

This one is for you, the one who is quietly drowning in work that is not actually yours to do anymore.

You are five, six, maybe eight years into this. You have clients. You have a reputation. People refer you. And somehow you are still the one answering every email, touching every deliverable, handling every follow-up. You are not stuck because you lack skill. You are stuck because you have not handed anything off, and you keep telling yourself you cannot afford to.

I want to challenge that story, because Eric Dingler challenged me on it, and I think it is worth passing along. You can check out the full conversation in the full episode.

The question you are asking is the wrong one

Eric built a web design and digital marketing agency from a literal side hustle, something he started to raise $50,000 for an international adoption debt-free. He grew it into a fully remote operation running across 20 countries, with a team he leads while traveling the world full-time with his wife and four teenagers. And the shift that made all of it possible was not a strategy change. It was a question change.

Most founders sit down, run the numbers, and ask: can I afford to hire someone? Eric flips it completely.

"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."

Read that again, slowly. Every hour you spend doing work someone else could own is an hour you are not spending on revenue. Not on growth. Not on leading. On technician work that has a ceiling baked right into it.

Real estate agents do not build the houses they sell. Eric heard that from a business coach four years ago and it hit him hard enough that he stopped logging into client websites entirely. He said he has not touched one in about three years, and the business kept growing.

The gap hire versus the team hire

Before you post a role anywhere, Eric says you have to be honest about what you actually need. There is a real difference between a gap hire and a team hire, and blurring the two is where most founders run into trouble.

A gap hire is a freelancer. Someone who fills variable workload, does a specific task, and is not part of your culture or your weekly rhythm. Eric's designer Max has built every website for the agency over the past two years, and Max is a freelancer. Some months Eric needs six sites designed. Some months he needs two. That is not a payroll position. That is a gap hire, and it works exactly as intended.

A team hire is different. That is someone you are developing, someone who will carry client-facing responsibility, someone who participates in the culture you are building. You cannot ask a freelancer to own the client relationship and then wonder why they are not showing up like a team member. The expectations have to match the structure.

And here is the honest part Eric added: if you cannot commit to paying someone every month, you are not ready to make a team hire yet. Get the recurring revenue stable first. Fix the feast or famine cycle before you try to bring someone on full-time. Eric did exactly that. He set up monthly maintenance plans, got enough predictable revenue, and then hired his first person for two hours a week. That person, Peter, is now his Director of Web Services six years later.

The mistake that kills the ROI of every hire

So let's say you do it. You hire someone to take 10 hours of work off your plate. What do you do with those 10 hours?

If you fill them with another project, another task, another thing that felt urgent, you have just wasted the hire. That is the move that keeps founders spinning in place even after they bring someone on.

Eric's rule is simple and worth writing down. Take 80 percent of the time you free up and do revenue-generating work only. Not admin. Not a project that has been sitting on your list. Revenue work. Call a past client about an upsell. Work the pipeline. Do the thing that actually moves money.

The other 20 percent splits like this: half of it goes to developing yourself as a leader and investing in the person you just hired. The other half is yours, no agenda, just yours. Go to Starbucks. Watch something. Decompress. That is the benefit of building a business.

Do that for four weeks and the revenue you generate will far outpace the salary you just added. The math is straightforward. The discipline to actually do it is the hard part.

Delegation is a systems problem, not a people problem

The other thing that stops founders cold is the belief that nobody can do it quite like they can. Eric hears this constantly, and he is pretty direct about it.

What most people confuse is unique judgment versus unique knowledge. Knowledge can be documented. It can be transferred into a system and handed off. True judgment calls, the decisions that genuinely require you as the founder, are far rarer than most owners admit. Eric said his executive assistant Emily now handles all of his email. He has not logged into his own inbox in a long time. A few items trickle up to him each day because only he has the judgment required for those. The rest lives in the system.

His agency has over 200 SOPs. He personally wrote two of them. His team builds and maintains everything else, because that is what a functioning leadership system actually produces.

Your leadership capacity is the ceiling for your business capacity. That is not a motivational line. It is the constraint that explains why you are stuck.

The next step

So here is what I want you to sit with. Not a checklist, just one honest question.

What is it costing you right now to not hire someone?

Not in dollars, necessarily. In hours. In focus. In the revenue you are leaving on the table because you are doing work that has a ceiling and you know it.

If you want to get clearer on which of the six principles is actually the bottleneck in your business right now, whether it is Intentionality, Optimization, Opportunity, or something else entirely, take the free Prime Performance Assessment at /assess. It takes a few minutes and it will show you exactly where to focus first.

Pay attention to what works for you.