Picture a service business where everyone is busy. Not looking-busy busy. Actually behind. Emails pile up, jobs slip a few days, the office manager stays late, and the owner is doing admin at night.
The obvious answer is to hire someone. And sometimes that’s the right answer. But I’d want to know one thing first: busy doing what?
What the owner thinks is wrong
“We’re understaffed.” It’s a fair read. There’s more work than hours. The math seems simple.
But “more work than hours” can mean two very different things. It can mean the business has more real work than the team can handle. Or it can mean the team is spending a big piece of every day on work that only exists because something upstream didn’t land right.
Those need different fixes. One needs a person. The other needs a handoff.
What I’d investigate
I’d ask the people doing the work to walk me through a normal week. Not their job description. Their actual week. And I’d listen for a few specific things:
- Re-entry. Typing the same information into a second or third place.
- Rework. Redoing something because it came in incomplete or wrong.
- Status checking. “Did that get sent?” “Is that job scheduled?” “Did the customer approve?”
- Chasing. Following up with coworkers, customers or vendors for information that should have arrived with the work.
If a meaningful part of someone’s week is in those four buckets, the team might not be short on people. They might be short on clean handoffs.
What’s probably underneath it
Usually it’s a small number of handoffs doing most of the damage. Sales hands a job to operations without the details operations needs. The field hands paperwork to the office in whatever form it happens to be in. One person finishes a task and nobody else knows it’s finished, so three people ask.
Each one costs a few minutes. Across a whole team, every day, those minutes are a job description.
What I’d change
I’d pick the two or three handoffs creating the most chasing and rework. Not all of them. Then, for each one:
- Decide what information has to travel with the work, every time.
- Decide where it goes, so nobody has to ask.
- Decide how the next person knows it’s ready.
Then I’d look at the week again a few weeks later. If the chasing and rework dropped and the team still can’t keep up, now you know you need a person, and you know exactly what that person’s job is.
What I’d leave alone
I wouldn’t cancel the hire on principle. Some businesses really are short on people. If the friction is fixed and the work is still more than the hours, hire. You’ll hire better, too, because you’ll be bringing someone into a process that works instead of handing them the chaos and hoping they sort it out.
One signal worth watching: if the same piece of information gets asked for more than once on the same job or client, that’s a handoff problem, not a staffing problem. Another person won’t make the information arrive. A defined handoff will.
The tradeoff
Fixing handoffs takes a few weeks, and during those weeks the team is still stretched. That’s the hard part. A hire feels like relief arriving. A process fix feels like more work before it feels like less.
But hiring takes weeks too, and a new person needs training, and if they walk into the same broken handoffs, they’ll spend their first months chasing information alongside everyone else.
The pattern
Hiring a person to absorb friction is one of the most common moves I see, and I get why. It’s concrete. It’s something you can do this week. Fixing a handoff is invisible work.
But if you hire into a broken handoff, you get one more person chasing information.
So before you post the job, try this: ask your busiest person to track, for one week, how much of their time is re-entering, redoing, checking status, or chasing. Not to judge them. To see the shape of the week.
If you’re not sure whether you’re looking at a people problem or a process problem, that’s exactly the kind of thing to bring to a Systems Fit Call.
