Hiring converts a variable cost — your own time — into a fixed cost that arrives every month whether or not the work does. That is a bet on demand, and the timing of the bet matters more than the candidate.
Real signals
- You are turning away work you would take, repeatedly, for months rather than weeks.
- A specific task eats hours weekly and does not need your judgment.
- You have three to six months of that salary in the bank, not just a good quarter.
- The work is predictable enough to explain to someone else.
False signals
- You are overwhelmed. Overwhelm is often a pricing or process problem, and hiring makes it management overwhelm instead.
- One big client just signed. Concentration risk, not proof of demand.
- It feels like what a real business does. Headcount is not a milestone.
- You want someone to figure out the part you have not figured out.
That last one deserves emphasis. Handing an undefined problem to a junior hire and hoping they invent the answer is the most common first-hire failure, and it usually gets blamed on the person rather than the setup.
Try it
Track your hours for one week in three buckets: work only you can do, work anyone trained could do, and work that should not happen at all. If bucket two is under ten hours, you are not hiring yet — you are pricing or automating.