Doing more with the same team
When a company grows, the first reflex is to hire another person. I start by asking whether a system could do that work instead.
Most companies I talk to have the same problem. Work grows faster than headcount, and every new hire means recruiting, onboarding, more meetings and one more channel where information gets lost. Hiring is sometimes the right call. Often, though, it’s the most expensive way to solve a problem that is really about process.
Three questions before you open a position
- How much time does your team spend copying data from one system to another?
- Which work does a person do only because two tools can’t talk to each other?
- What would happen if AI wrote the first draft of a document, quote or product description and a person just corrected it?
Answer these questions honestly and you’ll usually find dozens of hours a month that make sense to no one. That isn’t work for another employee. That’s work nobody should be doing.
A product instead of another desk
My approach is simple. I find the spot where work gets stuck and build a small product that removes it. Sometimes that means connecting an online store to the accounting system, sometimes an internal tool for quotes or automatic processing of inquiries. The result doesn’t have to be big. It has to be reliable, and people have to want to use it.
What matters is that a product like this doesn’t grow with the number of orders. A person who retypes a hundred orders a day by hand needs a colleague at two hundred. An integration handles both the same way.
People for what only people can do
The goal isn’t to replace anyone. The goal is for people in the company to do the work that takes judgment: talking to customers, making decisions, coming up with ideas. Let the system carry the routine.
When it works, the company does more with the same team, and that team is happier too. Nobody enjoys retyping orders.