So, you’ve decided to hire.
Brilliant. Your business is growing. You need the hands.
The candidate is excellent. The salary is $120,000.
Now let me do some quick maths with you.
At 12–15% margins, a $100K employee needs to generate $1,000,000 in revenue just to break even.
That’s before you factor in desk, equipment, onboarding, and the three months it takes for them to actually know what they’re doing.
Employing someone isn’t a salary decision. It’s a million-dollar decision.
So here’s the question nobody asks before they hire:
Are your systems ready for this person?
Because if your processes are broken — if data lives in three different places, if your quoting takes half a day, if onboarding means sitting next to someone for a week and hoping they absorb it — then you haven’t hired a solution.
You’ve hired someone to inherit the chaos.
They’ll spend their first three months figuring out workarounds.
Their productivity will plateau at 60% of what it should be.
And twelve months in, you’ll wonder why it still feels like you’re understaffed.
The right order is this:
First: fix the process.
Then: document it so anyone can run it.
Then: bring in the person to run it at scale.
When you hire into a well-engineered system, your new person is productive from week one — not month six.
That’s the difference between a million-dollar gamble and a million-dollar investment.
“Wish I had called him years earlier.” — Ryan McCarthy, Director, Stryker
Before your next hire, let’s spend 10 minutes looking at what they’ll be walking into.
A Process Audit will tell you exactly what needs fixing before you bring someone new into the picture.
It’s the best investment you can make before a million-dollar decision.
→ calendly.com/jurgen139/priority
P.S. The most expensive thing about a bad hire isn’t the salary. It’s the twelve months you spend before admitting it isn’t working.