I need to hire someone vs I can afford to hire someone.

These are two similar statements from different parts of your body.

The analysis that you can afford to hire someone comes from the brain and the feeling of need comes from your gut.

Actually scrap that.

The need comes from your brain when you’re trying to juggle multiple projects and run a business.

There’s no time to analyse, the need is what makes you act.

But… can you actually afford that hire?

You walk it back.

You now have enough work for another person because you’ve just won a new deal or your existing clients want more work.

Two figures often pop into your head.

The first is the expected revenue from that new project. The second is the salary of that new person.

I’m gonna earn X amount a month from that new project, and that person is gonna get paid ‘annual salary divided by twelve’ per month.

It’s a quick piece of maths designed to assess the risk that you won’t be able to meet payroll.

Unfortunately it’s no good (although you did get the number of months in a year right 👍).

Why this maths fails

There are other costs of employing someone, like taxes and software costs and social costs. So unless you’re gonna employ them, not give them any software, have no company events and commit tax fraud, you haven’t actually modelled whether you can meet payroll.

The deeper problem: margin

The second reason it doesn’t work is because they need to contribute to margin.

Your business has:

  • overheads, this person needs to help cover them
  • growth targets, this person needs to make money on top of that so you can be profitable
  • management overhead: they need to pay for the time you can’t earn because you’re managing them

And most importantly they need to also contribute to margin so you can grow.

Adding the leadership and support of another person, the financial, cognitive, time, and effort overhead of another employee, and accepting that you might just cover their employment costs in return is a poor move.

It’s akin to taking on a new client at a breakeven rate. Not only are they gonna stop you growing, but you’re now paying an opportunity cost of everything else you could do with that time and effort.

Why your instincts get worse as you grow

It’s unlikely to be as bad as that, let’s give your brain some credit, even when it’s beaten down and overworked.

You probably are gonna make money from this person. You just don’t know how much. And as you grow, your ability to guess how much, without doing some proper maths, reduces.

You’re gonna have multiple people on projects, multiple projects at different rates. Bigger projects become less efficient because of the feedback loops and client management gets harder.

All this stuff is gonna move around, and your vibes are gonna be more and more off.

That little piece of mental maths is gonna put you in a spot where you’re not making enough money. And if that spot is with a big client or a big hire, you’re gonna find it a hard place to untangle yourself from. The process of fixing a low margin project is gonna take time and energy away from the rest of your growth.

Over the next few weeks we are going to do some maths together.

Next time you realise you’re too busy you’ll have something to reach for to give you the confidence that you can afford that new person, what to pay them, and what you need them to bill.

And as well as some sums we’ll make sure we understand the levers.

Because we are very 2026 right now and as the benchmark for what an agency needs to make from its people shifts we are going to need to see clearly the change we need to make.