People are the last resort. Not the first.
This sounds cold until you've done it. Headcount is the most expensive thing you can add to a business, and it's the hardest thing to take back. You can switch off a tool. You can kill a feature. You can quietly retire a system that didn't work. Letting a person go is none of those things – it's a real cost to a real human who arranged their life around the job you offered.
So I exhaust everything else first. Systems. Code. Automation. The slightly tedious afternoon spent setting up the thing that means I never have to think about that task again.
A new hire feels like progress. It's the visible sign that the business is growing, the number you mention when people ask how it's going. But every person you add is a person whose salary has to be earned before you see a penny, every month, whether the month was good or not. That's not growth. That's a fixed cost, and calling it ambition doesn't change what it is.
I'm not against people. Some of the best things I've built, I built with others. I'm against reaching for people when a system would have done.
Hire when there's genuinely nothing left to automate. Not before.
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