📍   Hey everyone, welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I'm Sarah Beth Herman. Last week we talked about revenue and why a bigger number does not automatically mean that you built a better company. Today I wanna talk about one of the ways we can make that bigger company very expensive very quickly, and that's that we hire people.

And before anybody gets super nervous, this is not an episode about cutting payroll. I employ people. I believe in building teams. I have built global organizations with people all over the world, and there are absolutely moments when the correct business decision is to hire. But there is a sentence I hear constantly from business owners and leaders, " We need another person."

And maybe you do, but before you put another human being on payroll, I want you to answer a different question for me. What exactly are you hiring them to do? And the statement, "Help everybody because everybody's overwhelmed," is not a job description. It's just evidence. Something is happening inside the business and I want to understand what it is before we decide that another salary actually fixes it.

Because some of you don't have a staffing problem, you have a work problem. And you're about to put another person on payroll to help everybody live with it. This happens so quietly inside growing organizations. Nobody sits in a leadership meeting and says, "You know what we should do? Let's make everyone's job unnecessarily complicated."

It happens one reasonable decision at a time. An employee leaves, someone else says, "Hey, I'll just cover that job . And then six months later, they're still doing it. You buy a new software, but nobody completely shuts down the old process because a couple of people are still for some reason using it.

So now you have both. A client needs something outside your normal workflow, they're important, so you make an exception. Then another client gets a slightly different exception. Someone creates a spreadsheet because the system doesn't capture something and then a manager starts maintaining that spreadsheet.

Then someone else needs information from it so they make their own tracker. And eventually you have a company where people are incredibly busy, everyone is trying very hard, and nobody can completely explain why it takes 12 steps to accomplish something that probably should just take four. Then someone resigns and leadership says, "We're definitely going to have to replace them but before I post that job, I want to know what I'm replacing. Because if the position was built five years ago, I don't automatically assume the company needs the exact same position five years later. The company has changed, technology has changed, customers changed, the team changed, and hopefully, leadership has changed.

So why would we assume the job shouldn't? I want you to think about one person in your company who is just always overwhelmed. Not necessarily a poor performer. Actually, let's make this a little bit more interesting. Think about somebody who's really good, the employee everybody goes to. They know where everything is.

They know what happened with that client six months ago. They remember the password. They know which report was wrong. They know if the system says one thing, you actually have to check this other place because that's where the accurate information is. They know who to call. They know the workaround. They catch things before they become problems, and everyone loves them.

I love employees like this, but as a leader, they also make me a little bit nervous because sometimes an incredible employee is the reason I don't realize I have a terrible process. They're compensating for it. The business looks functional because they're functioning at an extraordinary level inside of something that isn't.

Take that employee away for two weeks, and suddenly everyone is asking, " How does this work again? Does anybody have the answer for this?" This is information. Your best employee may be holding together something leadership should have actually fixed a long time ago, and I think we have to be careful about celebrating that because we call people rock stars for surviving jobs we designed poorly.

We praise them for always being available. We love that they can handle everything. We reward them by giving them more things to handle. And then one day they tell us they're exhausted. Leadership is shocked, but I'm not. . I want to know why the company required that much human compensation in the first place.

There is some interesting workplace research around this, and Microsoft actually analyzed aggregated workplace activity and found that many employees using Microsoft three sixty five were being interrupted by a meeting, email, or notification about every two minutes during the workday.

They also surveyed workers, and nearly half said that their work felt chaotic and fragmented. Think about that before deciding somebody simply needs to become more productive. If I give an employee eight hours of work and then fracture those eight hours with messages, meetings, questions, approvals, interruptions, all day long, I don't actually have eight hours of capacity.

I have pieces of eight hours, and pieces don't always go back together neatly. Sometimes the answer is absolutely another person, but sometimes I could give my employees enormous amounts of capacity back by protecting the capacity I'm already paying for. That's actually cheaper, and frankly, it's usually better for the employee too.

I had to learn this in my own businesses because I'm naturally somebody who sees a problem and wants it solved immediately, and when you're growing quickly, hiring can feel like solving. We're behind,

I need something off my plate, so we're gonna hire. There are times that I've done exactly that, and it was actually the right decision. But there are also times I've had to look at something and admit, " I don't need another person. I just built a bad job." And those are uncomfortable words for a CEO because it's much easier to say that an employee isn't keeping up than it is to ask whether the job makes any sense.

Imagine I hire someone to do three things. Over time, I give them seven. Then somebody leaves, and I give them two more temporarily. Then the company grows, and I add another responsibility because they're really good at it, and now they own ten or twelve completely unrelated things. Three years later, I'm frustrated because I can't get consistent accountability.

Accountability for what? What did I actually build? If I posted that exact job today, would a reasonable person look at it and understand what they're actually responsible for? Would the responsibilities even belong together? Would I hire one person with the right skill set for all of them? If the answer is no, I can't keep pretending that this is exclusively an employee problem.

Some of it belongs to leadership. And this is where season five and season six met for me of this very podcast.   we spent an entire season talking about the human side of leadership. I told you there is a human being on the other side of your leadership. That doesn't stop being true because now we're talking about efficiency and payroll.

Actually, I think it matters more. Gallup's 2026 workplace research found global manager engagement fell twenty-two percent in two thousand and twenty-five. Gallup has also found that managers play an enormous role in the engagement of their team. So imagine what happens when the manager is the person we're loading up.

They're managing 12 people. They're doing work that used to belong to somebody who left. They're in meetings all day and answering Teams or Slack messages. They're approving things, covering operational gaps, supposed to be developing their people, supposed to be watching performance, and then leadership adds three more direct reports because technically there's room on the org chart.

At some point, whether a human being can technically carry more and start asking whether carrying more allows them to do their actual job well. I think that's a leadership question. And good leadership doesn't mean making everyone's job easy. Work is allowed to be hard.

It can be hard. It should be hard. There are seasons when everybody has to stretch. I've lived through them. You've lived through them. But a difficult season and a permanently dysfunctional job are not the same thing.  another thing I want you to watch for. When somebody on your team tells you that they're overwhelmed, don't immediately respond with, " What can we take off your plate?"

It sounds like a great leadership question, and sometimes it is, but I wanna go one layer deeper here. Why is it on the plate at all? Because if I take something off of Sarah Best's plate, and I put it onto John's plate, I haven't necessarily solved anything. I've just relocated it. That's what companies do all the time.

The work moves around. Everyone feels this temporary relief, and three months later, John's overwhelmed. Now we need another employee. Instead, just look at the actual piece of work. Why do we do this? Who uses the result? What happens if we stop? Could the system do it? Could technology do part of it? Are two departments doing versions of the same thing?

Are we creating a report nobody reads? Are we manually entering information that already exists somewhere else? Are we holding a meeting because we've always held the meeting? Is somebody checking somebody else's work because we don't trust the process? Now we're getting somewhere. I don't want to move unnecessary work.

I wanna kill it, and technology makes this conversation even more important right now. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that AI is going to replace everybody. That's just lazy. But I also don't think a responsible business owner in twenty twenty-six gets to ignore what technology can now do.

Microsoft's twenty twenty-five Work Trend Index found that eighty-two percent of leaders expect to use some form of digital labor to expand their workforce capacity over the following twelve to eighteen months. The interesting word here for me was capacity, not replacement. Capacity. If something takes an employee six hours every week to do and technology can responsibly reduce it to one, I just got five hours back.

What am I doing with those five hours? That's where this gets exciting for me. Maybe I don't eliminate a job. Maybe I finally let that person do the job I originally hired them to do. Maybe my salesperson sells. Maybe my manager manages. Maybe my treatment coordinator talks to patients. Maybe my CEO acts like a CEO.

Technology isn't valuable because it lets us brag that we're using AI. It's valuable when it removes friction from work that human beings shouldn't have been spending so much time doing in the first place. And if you automate a terrible process without examining it first, congratulations. You may have just made the terrible process faster.

That's not innovation to me This episode of No Silver Spoons is sponsored by Dentistry Support. And dental practices are one of the easiest places to see all of this happen. An office calls and says, "We need another front desk employee." Okay, well, maybe. But tell me what's happening at the front desk.

The phones are ringing. Patients are checking in. Someone needs an insurance verification. There's a claim that hasn't paid. A patient has a billing question. Someone needs to schedule treatment. There's a hygiene opening tomorrow. An insurance company is on hold. The doctor needs something, and a patient just walked up to the front desk.

And somehow, the treatment coordinator is supposed to have a meaningful conversation with a patient about a sixteen thousand dollar treatment plan in the middle of all of this. I don't immediately hear, "You need another body." I hear, " We need to look at where the work lives." Maybe another employee is absolutely the answer, but

what if aging claims didn't have to live here? And what if phone coverage could be structured differently? What if people physically standing in front of your patients had more capacity to take care of people physically standing in front of them? That's part of why Dentistry Support exists. We help dental practices move administrative work into systems designed to handle it through support with eligibility verification, billing, and accounts receivable, along with your entire virtual phone system.

The goal isn't to make people irrelevant. It's the opposite. It's to stop wasting capable people on work that prevents them from doing the things they're uniquely positioned to do. And whether you ever work with Dentistry Support or not, please use our free training available at dentristrysupport.com/freetraining.

Learn something. Take it back to your practice. Fix something. Dentistry Support, delivering results and simplifying everything. Now I want you to do something this week. I'm deliberately not giving you a giant framework. I want you to pick one position in your company that always feels overwhelmed. One.

And for five working days, figure out what that person actually does. Not their job description. I don't care what the job description says right now. What do they actually do? Where did their time go? What interrupted them? What did they have to redo? What information did they have to chase? What meetings did they attend?

What work came to them simply because everybody knows they're capable? What are they doing because another employee left two years ago and nobody ever moved the responsibility back? You might be shocked. Then look at the work without the person's name attached to it, and don't start with, "How can Sarah Beth do this faster?"

Instead, I want you to ask, "Should this work exist at all? And if it should, is this actually the right place for it to live?" Those two questions can save you an enormous amount of payroll. They can also save a really good employee. Because there's another side to this that I don't want business owners to miss.

When great employees keep getting rewarded with everybody else's work, eventually being great starts to feel like a punishment. I want you to think about that. The person who finishes quickly gets another task. The person who figures things out gets every difficult problem. The person who never complains becomes the person leadership assumes has endless capacity.

And the employee who's always willing to help slowly becomes responsible for things nobody intentionally assigned. Then we wonder why our best person suddenly says they're done. Sometimes they didn't suddenly become disengaged. Sometimes we spent three years teaching them that competence would be rewarded with more weight, and that's on us.

And I don't say that to beat up leadership. I've had to look at myself as a leader too. I say it because once we see it, we can change it. That's the entire point of this season at No Silver Spoons. We're not sitting around analyzing ourselves forever. We're looking at something honestly and then doing something with the information.

So before you approve another position, I want you to be able to finish this sentence: I am hiring this person because... Now fill in the blank. And the answer needs to be better than everybody is drowning. If everybody is drowning, find out why they're in the water. Maybe demand has genuinely exceeded capacity, and another person is exactly what the business needs.

Great. Hire them. But maybe the work is duplicated. Maybe the process is broken. Maybe the wrong person owns it. Maybe your strongest employee has quietly accumulated four jobs. Maybe technology changed and your processes didn't. Maybe you've built an entire position around exceptions that should never have become normal.

That's worth knowing before you add another salary, because hiring somebody into a broken system doesn't repair the system. It gives the broken system another person to consume, and I don't think that's fair to the business. I don't think it's fair to the existing team, and I definitely don't think it's fair to the person you're about to hire. So that's your work this week. One position, five days, look at the actual work and ask yourself, " If this person disappeared tomorrow and I had to build this job again from nothing, would I intentionally rebuild it exactly this way?"

If the answer is no, don't start recruiting yet. Start there. Next week, we're going after the problem everybody in your company already knows about. You know the one. People joke about it. They complain about it. New employees discover it. Leadership has discussed it 15 times, and somehow it's still there.

If everybody knows the problem exists, I don't think you need another meeting to identify it. I think you need to decide why you've allowed it to survive, and we're gonna talk about that next week. I'm Sarah Beth, and this is No Silver Spoons. Before you hire another  📍 person, look at the work. I'll catch you on the next episode