When a business runs out of capacity, the response is often to hire another person. AI, automation and specialist talent mean entrepreneurs now have a more important question to ask first.

One of the most common sentences I hear from growing business owners is, “We need to hire someone.” Sometimes they’re right. But often what they really mean is that something isn’t getting done. Sales leads aren’t being followed up. Marketing has become inconsistent. Customer service is overwhelmed. Or the founder is spending 10 hours a week doing work they know they shouldn’t be doing.

For decades, our solution to those problems has been remarkably consistent. Create a job, bundle together a collection of responsibilities, write a job description, decide on a salary and find somebody willing to perform those tasks for roughly 40 hours a week.

That model isn’t disappearing. But AI, automation, fractional executives, freelancers, outsourced partners and global specialists give entrepreneurs far more options than we had even a few years ago. So before you create another job, ask a different question: What outcome are we actually trying to buy?

I recently went through this exercise in one of my own businesses. We wanted to increase the number of qualified sales opportunities we were generating, and the obvious answer seemed to be hiring more business development people.

But “hire another salesperson” wasn’t really the outcome we needed. We wanted a consistent pipeline of qualified conversations with the right potential customers.

Once we defined it that way, we started breaking apart the work required to produce those conversations.

Source link