Adding a new team member is one of the bigger investments you'll make as a business owner. The impact can be huge, in either direction.

Because of that impact, this is one of the most common topics in client calls. And while it usually starts with "Can I afford the addition?" it rarely ends there.

Whether the business can afford the person matters. But it's rarely what determines whether the hire actually works out.

What does? I see the same three things drive it almost every time:

1. Is this a new role or an existing one?
2. How will they be onboarded?
3. How will they be evaluated?

They're interrelated, but each one is its own kind of structural work that owners tend to skip in the rush to fill the seat. Let me walk through each, starting with whether the role is new or existing.

A new role in a growing company is usually built from pieces of other people's jobs. Sometimes from one person who's drowning, sometimes cherry-picked from several. Either way, there's no history to it. And the unknowns create uncertainty for both the new hire and the people they're joining.

This same problem can show up with an existing role too, if you haven't updated the role based on what you learned from the previous person. Most owners skip that update in the rush to fill the seat. The result: you're hiring against a job description that doesn't match the work that actually needs to get done.

Before you advertise, write down what the work actually looks like in your business right now. Reconcile that back to the tasks that are most critical. It sounds obvious. It's also the step most owners skip.

The next place success is made or undone is onboarding. This usually goes one of two ways. Either there's no real onboarding process, or there is one but it ends roughly a week after the new hire walks through the door.

Onboarding should be at least a 90-day endeavor. It includes access, culture, introductions to teammates, an overview of how things actually run, and yes, how to do the actual job. The two things that matter most: break it into manageable pieces, and be intentional about how each piece gets explained.

Here's where most owners get tripped up. You hired them because they've done this job before. So you assume they don't need much guidance. But they've never actually done the job for you, in your company. That gap is bigger than it sounds.

How will you know if any of this is working? That's the third thing. And it's not a quarterly performance review. It's the bigger question: have you actually defined what success looks like in this role, and have you communicated it to the person you hired?

Most owners haven't. They have a feeling. They know what they don't want more than what they do. They hire someone, watch them work, and react.

The new hire ends up shooting at a target you haven't defined. They'll either define it themselves and probably get it wrong from your perspective, or they'll stay in motion waiting for direction that never comes, or they'll burn themselves out trying to read your mind. In all three cases you're going to feel like the hire "isn't working out," and you won't be able to say exactly why.

The fix isn't a fancy evaluation framework. It's getting clear, yourself, on what this role actually needs to accomplish. What does success look like in 30 days? In 90? In a year? If you can't answer those, the new hire can't be evaluated. There's nothing to evaluate against.

All three are structural work. They're work you have to do before you start interviewing. And they're work that gets skipped because hiring usually happens when you're already stretched thin and you just need help.

But skipping the structural work doesn't make hiring easier. It makes it more expensive. The hire that "didn't work out" usually didn't work out for a reason you could have addressed before the person ever started. Which means the affordability question was answered before they ever showed up.

The question isn't really "Can I afford the addition?" The question is "Have I done the work to make sure they can succeed once they're in the seat?"

~ Nolan