Your first hire
is not an advisor.

Most principals make their first hire an advisor, because they are drowning and an advisor is what they are.

The hire everyone gets wrong

Most principals make their first hire an advisor, because they are drowning and an advisor is what they are. It is usually the wrong first hire.

The work drowning a solo principal is rarely advice. It is scheduling, paperwork, transfers, billing, reporting, compliance filing and following up on things — and none of that improves by adding a second person who also wants to be in meetings.

Work out what you are actually short of

Track two weeks honestly, in half-hour blocks, and sort it into three columns: work only you can do, work someone else could do with training, and work that should not be done by anyone at your firm.

Almost every principal who does this discovers the same thing. The first column is smaller than they thought, the second is enormous, and the third is larger than zero.

Operations before advice

An operations hire returns capacity immediately, is easier to train, is cheaper, and does not compete with you for client relationships. An advisor hire takes eighteen months to become useful, requires a book to build or inherit, and raises questions about equity you may not be ready to answer.

The exception is a firm genuinely turning away clients. If demand is the constraint rather than capacity, hire an advisor — but be honest about which it is, because most firms diagnose demand and are actually suffering from capacity.

The mistake in the offer

Hiring a person to do work you have never documented means they will do it your way, badly, for six months, and then leave or invent their own way.

Write the process before the job description. Not a manual — a checklist per recurring task. The act of writing it usually reveals that a third of it should be automated or dropped, which changes the role you are hiring for.

What it costs beyond salary

Payroll taxes and benefits, a workstation and software seats, supervision time, and the six to twelve weeks before they are net positive. A useful planning figure is that the first year costs meaningfully more than the salary and returns less than a full year of output.

The firms that are surprised by this are usually the ones that hired reactively, in a busy quarter, without modelling it.

The alternative worth considering first

For many solo firms, the honest answer is that the first hire should not be a person. It should be moving the operational work to someone who already does it at scale — because a full-time salary buys a great deal less operational capability than an operating partner does, and it arrives on day sixty rather than day one.

Running it in-house versus outsourcing it →