Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: I have built my businesses to a larger scale than a lot of people who are listening to this will ever have built their business to. I also wasn't the CEO of a billion dollar business or a unicorn startup, and I didn't have 50 VPs reporting into me. But I do understand what it looks like to hire people.
[00:00:21] Ken: I know what it looks like to build a culture. I do know what it looks like to have a team to invest into that team, to build a leadership team, to delegate, and to do the things that a lot of people won't ever do as freelancers. Solopreneurs consultants, people that are running even smaller agencies or even small firms where they don't really truly have people on payroll.
[00:00:49] Ken: So I feel very justified when I talk about this topic of why hiring is not a badge of honor, because I have been to both [00:01:00] extremes. I have been the person that is hired. I have been the person that has built to seven figures without any employees. I have been the person who has built solo businesses. My current business, the umbrella way I describe it, the category that I created is called the remote solopreneur, but it doesn't mean that we have to do things all by ourself that we can't have any help, or even in some cases have contractors that are full-time or employees.
[00:01:29] Ken: Even today in 2025, there is this belief that you are not a real business or that you are not growing unless you are hiring. And I just do not believe that hiring is a badge of honor or a badge of success. In fact, people hire too soon all the time, and before you tune out on this, you're hiring in different ways.
[00:01:52] Ken: It doesn't mean that you just put someone on payroll. Having an employee doesn't mean hiring. You could get a contractor who's helping you with [00:02:00] something. You can hire a quote unquote business coach. You'll learn how I feel about that term. You could be. Hiring, essentially AI or a tool to do a job. And even some of the AI agent platforms now actually say, why don't you hire our AI agents to do this job at a fraction of the cost?
[00:02:17] Ken: So the reality is that most people hire two soon within that lens and within that context to outsource things that they should not be outsourcing to give away parts of the business. That they should not be giving away yet. I wanna give you three practical things to look at in terms of when you actually should consider hiring.
[00:02:40] Ken: Not again, just putting people on payroll, but it might be something like that because as I said, pretty much everyone hires too soon in their business. I've seen people that would describe themselves. As agencies that are making a few hundred thousand dollars a year and not even paying themselves six figures.
[00:02:59] Ken: I've [00:03:00] seen seven figure businesses where the owner is taking home less than a hundred thousand dollars a year,
[00:03:06] Ken: hired too soon, gave away parts of the business, had some things missing that we need to talk through today.
[00:03:12] Ken: So here is the first thing that I would suggest you have in your business before hiring. And this really is probably the one that's gonna look more at putting someone on payroll or having significant people related costs, but you absolutely have to have a way. To generate business consistently before you ever consider hiring and having a significant part of the expenses, being people in either a contract or a payroll capacity,
[00:03:39] Ken: why is this important?
[00:03:41] Ken: Because I have seen, and I have experienced the times where you have a certain thing happening. Maybe you got picked up on some PR thing, you announced that you were. Leaving your job and you got a bunch of leads, you got a bunch of people that kind of fell into your lap as leads, and then you continued forward with that.
[00:03:59] Ken: One [00:04:00] thing that wasn't truly scalable, that was really more exclusively and only word of mouth when you probably don't have a business based on the number of clients that you have that can grow consistently that way. So you kind of went forward. Another thing came in, it was a significant client. You started really doing a lot of work for that client.
[00:04:19] Ken: They became what I call an anchor client. They're paying you over 20% of your revenue, which is not a good thing, and you have a risk there. But that company maybe wanted more and more, I call it the Hungry Dragon again, but that one client could be a hungry dragon that really just. Every time you have more capacity, they take more capacity.
[00:04:40] Ken: Maybe you even have a bunch of contractors that are working for that particular client and then, oops, something happens that client goes away, and now you don't have another way to backfill that client quickly. There are a bunch of different ways to generate business consistently.
[00:04:57] Ken: At some point, you want to have multiple channels [00:05:00] that are working. I talk about it as having one channel that you dominate or saturate, have two that are warming up, including one that you own. But this doesn't typically look like I post to a social channel and get leads once in a while. This also doesn't necessarily look like I have search engine optimizations that wind up getting me some clients, and they don't come in with any frequency or regularity because that's not what SEO is about.
[00:05:29] Ken: That the way I do those things, I like those things. They're just not scalable. Ways to generate business consistently, and that's the last part of the way I described this consistently. Do you have a way to scale up leads if you want it to scale up more leads? This also doesn't mean blasting the internet with cold messages all the time in a way that is not gonna generate responses and reflect negatively on your business.
[00:05:56] Ken: There are ways to do each of these different kinds of [00:06:00] marketing. That actually will drive success. I teach people what does it look like to actually reach out to someone in a human way, in a personalized way that will generate interest. Even if they don't know your name, obviously, if they do know your name, it's gonna go even better.
[00:06:15] Ken: But I even have clients today who have teams who have payroll, who actually have payroll costs, struggle. And are more stressed out because they don't truly have that way to generate business consistently.
[00:06:27] Ken: We're working on it now and they're making progress on it, but they didn't have that way to truly generate business consistently, and now they're in a spot where they really need that to work because they have payroll costs.
[00:06:39] Ken: So you need to have that working really well for yourself. If you are a solopreneur consultant, a founder or coach of a smaller business or a solo business, you need to have that thing working first before you even think about hiring. With regards to having contractors or having employees.
[00:06:57] Ken: And by the way, as a side note.
[00:06:59] Ken: A [00:07:00] channel might perform really well for a while and then it might not, which is why we have the two warming up. I've been through that multiple times in my business, including overly relying on Google and SEO in my agency, and then they made a change. We called it the ification of search results for agencies where they started to put directories ahead of.
[00:07:22] Ken: People like myself when I had all of the top search engine results, and that had a big impact on my business. Or even more recently, as algorithms changed across social networks, there were really the free glory days where there was almost unlimited traffic. And then, oops, they really want you to pay to play, which happens pretty much all the time.
[00:07:39] Ken: So thankfully, I subscribe to my own philosophy here and I've had multiple different channels and now I just use different channels. I still use some of those channels, but they're not my primary channels as much.
[00:07:49] Ken: Okay. Number two.
[00:07:50] Ken: This one is really focusing on a best practice that I learned during my agency days because I needed to have some metrics [00:08:00] and KPIs to understand when I should start looking at bringing someone onto the team.
[00:08:05] Ken: If I looked at my current team and I looked at my current performance relative to something that we talk about as. Revenue per headcount or revenue per employee. We had a metric that we'd look at, and I obviously would talk to other people in the industry that were friends, or even in certain cases they maybe were building something similar to me and we compare notes and also knowing what does it look like on the market.
[00:08:32] Ken: Let's start with the ones that are crazy numbers, just to kind of show you what it looks like at the highest level. When you look at companies and some of the data here is a little bit dated, but it's all within the last two or three years. Nvidia, 3.6 million revenue per employee. Netflix, two and a half million.
[00:08:52] Ken: Apple, 2.4 million meta, 2.4 million. Alphabet, Google, 1.8 million. You get the point. If you move [00:09:00] into private sas, it's quite a bit lower. It can go all the way down to 120 5K. If you then start to think about things like consultancies, agency benchmarks, the number that we used to consider, the gold standard, and I wouldn't also say, don't just go for the benchmark.
[00:09:17] Ken: I mean, why Just go for the benchmark if you. Have the benchmark go work at a job. Real, right? Real talk. Go get a job. But we would typically look at 200 K revenue per employee as sort of a standard for how we would assess what's the performance of the business. And that's actually an easy way to kind of look at, let's say an org chart or if you looked up a company on LinkedIn or used Crunchbase and you said, okay, they have 10 employees.
[00:09:42] Ken: If they were. A healthy business, they should be with 10 actual employees, a $2 million a year business. But a lot of businesses that are at that level are doing under a hundred K. And if you're looking at that number or you're calculating that on the fly and you're surprised by it, here's why. I [00:10:00] have a suggestion that is actually even more aggressive today because of these other advancements, that 200 k number.
[00:10:07] Ken: Was used when AI didn't exist, period. It was still just a thing that we talked about in movies. There definitely weren't low-code, no-code platforms. The ones that were out there were new and they were clunky, and they definitely didn't have all the integrations that were available. There was no such thing as obviously ag agentic platforms.
[00:10:24] Ken: So today I would look at it as 300 k, but I'll even put a little asterisk next to that. Because 300 K today to me, would also be a number I would like to aspire for you to take home. And I understand that there are people listening globally to this. That's the way the internet works. But we're looking at it generally from a 300 K, US dollars, and you can make a adjustment for your local currency.
[00:10:52] Ken: See, I care about people. I'm talking about it. At a couple different levels. So 300 K for you to take home. I know a [00:11:00] lot of agency owners, like I said, who are taking home, in certain cases, a crazy small, like an unlovable amount of money, but they have a team, not a badge of honor. So $300,000 take home. And if you have expenses, and you shouldn't have crazy high expenses, but you will have to have some amount of money that's running your technology,
[00:11:22] Ken: And that will probably be one of your biggest expenses, by the way. You might have some lightweight contract help, you might have a VA or something like that. So generally speaking. I think your costs should be less than $10,000 by transparently a wide margin. If you're putting yourself on payroll, that's not gonna be the case, but again, your accountants will be smart and they'll come up with a reasonable number for your salary.
[00:11:43] Ken: But even if you had put yourself on payroll and you're paying yourself around the six figure mark ish, maybe a little bit above, based on a lot of data that I understand, you're probably still less than 20 k. but let's say you were at 20 KA month, which would be really high, [00:12:00] then obviously you're not taking home $300,000
[00:12:04] Ken: and really your payroll cost is paying you. So it's not entirely a cost that you should think about in that number 'cause it's going back to you.
[00:12:10] Ken: But really looking at this number as a standard. For you to get to taking home, which means that you're making even more than that to cover some of those expenses. Long story long,
[00:12:21] Ken: and I know that people are listening to this now and thinking that sounds aggressive. Or again, they may have two or three or four or five or under 10 employees, and they definitely don't take that home. When I had an agency. And I had 20 plus people, and they all were paidway above industry standards.
[00:12:38] Ken: I was doing remote again before remote was a thing. I wasn't paying people based on where they lived. I had people in other parts of the world that were getting paid us rates, just paid people that what I knew was right for that kind of talent. But in that case, I was still making sure I took care of myself.
[00:12:54] Ken: Did I do it from day one? No, I learned it. That's why I'm trying to help you now. I learned it over time and I would pay [00:13:00] myself. My salary to help from a tax standpoint. I would then also have an owner's draw. I then also made sure that I aggressively invested into my 401k, and I had a gracious plan, a profit sharing plan relative to the 401k that also invested a lot into everyone else's 4 0 1 Ks, but all in it was definitely a significant number.
[00:13:22] Ken: It was above the number that I'm talking about here.
[00:13:24] Ken: And again, that was not yesterday, right? When a lot of this stuff didn't exist. So we're gonna get to a spot for sure where there are jobs inside of a solo business, inside of an agency, inside whatever kind of business that looks like the kind of businesses here around professional services in some sort of capacity.
[00:13:45] Ken: Where they're doing 5 million or $10 million a year, and they may only have a rainmaker, maybe a chief of staff, possibly contract help depending on what the thing was. But they'd definitely be using [00:14:00] a bunch of AI agents, AI and other things to keep that team very lean. I know in every single market right now.
[00:14:07] Ken: There is a look at how do you get more for less. So number two, hitting 300 KA year before we look at hiring within any of these capacities.
[00:14:19] Ken: And then really getting into this, touched on it briefly, but when it does come to. Technology. I don't just group it immediately into ai. I was just sharing with a few people recently. I have so many things in my business that aren't related to ai, that are just automations. There's nothing agentic, there's no ai.
[00:14:40] Ken: It's just an automation. Beyond that though, and I talk about this concept as document template, automate, there's a bunch of things that are just templates. I have. Keyboard snippet expansions that let me output things from my keyboard into an email, into a message that I use all day. It could be a web URL, it could be a [00:15:00] initial message to someone that reached out to me or me reaching out to them.
[00:15:03] Ken: Templates, document things that you're doing a couple times a month. Template, something that you're doing a few times a week, and automate things that you might be doing multiple times a day. So I have some very basic, simple flows on platforms like Zapier that when a trigger happens, a bunch of magic happens, and transparently, that's something that people like to see even when they start working with me.
[00:15:26] Ken: Oh my gosh, that was magical onboarding. Everything was just done as soon as I paid you. Yep. Those were called systems. Systems don't even need to be. The actual technology systems are a way to get something done consistently without room for error
[00:15:42] Ken: and be able to produce consistent results. So I talk about systems for things like offers. I talk about systems for things like lead generation. I talk about systems for things like client onboarding or delivering outstanding results. Those are systems.
[00:15:56] Ken: In terms of ai, you can have some really basic [00:16:00] ai. I'm not talking about just using chat GBT to help you whip up something quickly or answer a question. You can use projects in chat, GT and Claude. I've got a bunch of projects and I'm working more and more to move things out of chats to move them into projects because projects have context, even though now CHATT has context across all of your chats.
[00:16:22] Ken: Projects allow you to store specific information that could be referenced. And I have a bunch of different projects for things related to different parts of my business. And what I've always said, and this is the coolest thing about where we're going next, is I want to look at how do you make a fleet of you?
[00:16:40] Ken: I called a fleet of me. So now you're not just competing against me, you're competing against 12 different versions of me. And by the way, I don't mind you getting contract help to do some of those things, to create that fleet of you, but don't jump straight to that. You have to have the other things working first, going all the way back to what is the way that you're getting [00:17:00] business consistently, and that really kind of sounds a little bit more like lead generation, but you have to then take a lead and close that lead through offers into your sales process.
[00:17:10] Ken: And then obviously. Not get stuck in what I call delivery help.
[00:17:13] Ken: So we need to make sure before we jump to the more sophisticated things that you're asking for, especially in social places like LinkedIn, everyone's commenting for these viral lead magnets and you don't even know. if I asked you what is the simple way to describe what you do, you couldn't describe it to me, but you want to comment for this elaborate flow.
[00:17:34] Ken: On one of the automation platforms. When you don't understand that doesn't make sense. I think we are gonna get to a place where the kind of contract help and the kind of help we're looking at might even be people that are just experts on some of these things. Do you really want to hire a va? Who might make mistakes and takes a long time to get up to speed, or can you hire someone and contract someone who can [00:18:00] build you an agentic VA who loads in all of your knowledge and the ways that you describe things and creates that for you in an afternoon?
[00:18:09] Ken: We're not gonna go deep into that today. I have talked a little bit about this in the past, and we'll definitely talk more about it, but you can see why, especially going into. What I call building the 2030 company, that hiring is not gonna be a badge of honor. I'm always researching. I'm always learning, and I came across something recently and I'm still digging into it, but essentially it was someone that was like, I have 27 agents working for me, and they all do these different things.
[00:18:36] Ken: I'm probably the only person on earth that is doing things at this scale with agents. And at this revenue level, and this person I think had a few different ventures. If I knew their name, I would say it just something that I bookmarked that is the world that is coming faster and sooner and quicker than you realize.
[00:18:53] Ken: So I don't want to hear this, which is in some ways, part of what prompted this conversation, although I've talked about this in [00:19:00] the past, not necessarily on the podcast. Oh, well, I don't know. I, I have someone else that does that for me, and that's why they did it. You, you don't know. You're outsourcing something to a low level person who makes considerably less than you and assuming that they're gonna produce results that are gonna drive you to a new place in your business.
[00:19:18] Ken: Doesn't make any sense. That's why I've always been, as I started this business, very down on VAs. And there are some phenomenal VAs and EAs, and I know they're out there, but you should not work with that kind of person unless they are executing against your playbooks and your systems and the things that work in your business.
[00:19:37] Ken: I know because I talked about this at the beginning of this conversation, I've hired before. You don't hire someone in That is someone who's going to not be an equity owner. And someone that's gonna make considerably less than you as the owner and say, I'm gonna give you this thing and assume you're gonna do a better job at it than I do.
[00:19:56] Ken: I'm gonna give you this thing. And even though you're [00:20:00] making a fraction of what I make as a va, an ea, or a low level person, it's a significant part of my business and just hope it all goes to plan.
[00:20:09] Ken: Why would you do that? Doesn't make any sense.
[00:20:12] Ken: Those things are for acceleration,
[00:20:13] Ken: and that is actually kind of where it will land. This conversation is that hiring to me is about when you are ready to hit the gas. It is not. Let me throw some bodies at this problem and hope that things get better.
[00:20:27] Ken: That's a quick way to have a very high payroll cost or a high people cost and not have you take home the money for all that hard work. So please, as we push to being a 2030 company, realize that hiring is not a badge of honor. It is not a sign of success. I don't care if you have. Family members that tell you that you learned that your whole life, that's not where we're going.
[00:20:50] Ken: Three steps before hiring. Have a way to generate business, consistently. Hit 300 K plus a year. Ideally, that's actually your take home, but not always at that [00:21:00] stage. And think about systems, not just ai, but systems ai. And then eventually you get into the age agentic world. And possibly some contract help or possibly someone who can fill in gaps because they've actually been there, done that.
[00:21:14] Ken: So thanks as always for hanging out in this conversation. I love talking about this stuff. If this is something that you appreciate and you're learning something, if you got a nugget, let me know. Feel free to send me a note or leave a rating or review, and I look forward to having another conversation soon on how to grow without hiring.