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About 45 people across six continents at Legiit. Eight years running it. Every time I've slowed down hiring to write the thing down first, the hire worked. Every time I skipped that step because I needed the help yesterday, the hire turned into a second problem on top of the first one.
Document the way you do the thing before you hire someone to do the thing.
Otherwise you didn't hire a solution. You hired a problem.
Here's how to do it right.
Most business owners hire because they're drowning.
The job is in their head. They've done it 1,000 times. They know the steps so well they don't even think of them as steps anymore. They think of them as "how it gets done."
So they hire someone, sit them at a desk, and tell them to "figure it out."
The new person can't figure it out. Nobody could. The job lives in your head, not in the world.
Now you have two problems.
You're still drowning. And you have somebody on payroll asking you the same questions all day, every day, because the answers only exist when you say them out loud.
Six weeks in, you're more underwater than before you hired.
Then you blame the hire.
The hire wasn't the problem. The undocumented job was the problem.
Before any of this works, you have to get over the "no one can do it as good as me" thing.
You're right. They can't. Not at first. Maybe not ever, on every dimension.
Doesn't matter.
You're not hiring somebody to do it as good as you. You're hiring somebody to do it 80% as good as you, so the 100% version of you can go do something only you can do. That math is the entire game. If you keep doing it yourself because nobody can match you, you've capped your business at one person. That's not a business (no matter what Justin Welsh and digital nomads tell you). That's a job you gave yourself.
Once you're past that, the rest is mechanical.
Don't hire for a role that isn't written down. Not in detail, not yet. But the basics. What does this person own. What does success look like in 90 days. What decisions are theirs to make. What decisions still come to you. If you can't write that in one page, you don't know the role well enough to hire for it.
Record yourself doing the work for two weeks before the hire. Loom. Screen recording. A notebook. Whatever. Not perfect documentation. Just every single time you do the task, capture how you did it. By the end of two weeks you have raw material that's worth more than any SOP you'd write in a vacuum.
Write the SOP from the recordings, not from memory. Memory is the lie. You'll forget the 7 weird edge cases that come up once a month. The recordings won't. The hire's first 90 days are the edge cases. That's what wrecks the onboarding.
Build the FAQ before the hire asks the questions. You already know the questions. You've answered them 50 times in your head. Write the answers down once. The first 30 days of any new hire is mostly the same questions. If they have to come ask you, you didn't do your job.
Make the hire's first project to improve the doc. They onboard by reading it, doing the work, and then editing the doc with what was missing or wrong. Now the next hire onboards faster. Now the system gets better instead of worse with each new person. This is the difference between a business that scales and a business where you have to retrain everybody every six months.
Stop telling yourself you'll write it down later. Later doesn't come. You won't have more time after the hire than you did before. You'll have less. The window to document is before you're paying somebody to wait for documentation.
If the job is too varied to document, you're not hiring a doer. You're hiring a thinker. Different role. Different pay. Different interview. Different expectations. Mixing the two is how you hire a $60k assistant for a $150k strategy job, or vice versa, and resent both of them for not being the other one.
The business owners who can hire well aren't smarter. They're just doing the boring work of writing down what's in their head before they expect someone else to read their mind.
The doc is the job.
The hire just operates the doc.
If the doc doesn't exist, you didn't hire a solution.
You hired your second problem.
Get over yourself. Write it down. Hire third.
Think Big.
Here’s What to Do Next.
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