Why hiring gets postponed
There are usually three reasons: fear of ongoing costs, the feeling that it is faster to do it yourself, and a bad experience in the past. All three are understandable, but delay has its own price — it simply does not look like an expense.
Six signs
1. The owner spends more than half their time on day-to-day operations
If your day consists of tasks a specialist on 300,000–500,000 tenge could do, while there is no time for strategy and development, you are working in a role that should have been filled by hiring long ago. Calculate what your hour costs and compare it with the cost of an employee.
2. There are orders you have to turn down
The clearest sign of all. If you are telling clients "we cannot take this on right now, we lack capacity", you are already paying for the absence of an employee — in lost revenue.
3. Regular overtime has become the norm
The team consistently stays late for months on end. Two scenarios follow: quality drops or people leave. Usually both.
4. Tasks fall through the cracks between people
Nobody owns an area end to end: the client was not called back, documents were not prepared, an order was lost. This is a sign that the function exists but has no owner.
5. A key employee has become irreplaceable
If one person's departure would paralyse an area of the business, you are carrying a risk out of all proportion to the cost of a second specialist. Holiday, illness or resignation immediately becomes a crisis.
6. You pay more for overtime than an employee would cost
Overtime, freelance help, urgent contractors — add it up for a quarter. Often the sum exceeds the salary of the person you did not hire.
A check: do you need a person or better order?
Before opening a vacancy, check honestly whether the problem can be solved another way. Hiring does not cure chaos in processes; it scales it.
| Situation | What is needed |
|---|---|
| There is objectively more work than the team has hours | hire |
| People are busy, but much time goes on rework and approvals | processes first, then hiring |
| One person is overloaded, another underused | redistribute responsibilities |
| Tasks are repeated manually every day | automate |
| The function is needed but not full time | outsourcing or part-time work |
Calculating payback
Before opening a vacancy it is worth doing a simple calculation:
Full monthly cost of an employee = salary × 1.2 (contributions) + workstation and equipment + manager's time spent supervising
Expected contribution = additional revenue, or time freed up for others × their rate
A sales manager on 400,000 ₸ costs roughly 520,000 ₸ a month with all overheads. At a 20% margin they need to bring in about 2.6 million ₸ of revenue to pay for themselves. Then the question is simple: is that realistic in your market?
For support roles, calculate differently — through time freed up. If an accountant on 350,000 ₸ frees 40 hours of your time a month at your rate of 9,000 ₸, you gain 360,000 ₸ of released resource plus a lower risk of reporting errors.
Who to hire first
When there is money for one person and you need three, the order matters most. A simple rule works: hire first whoever frees up the most owner time or brings in the most money.
| Situation in the business | Who to hire first | Why |
|---|---|---|
| More enquiries than you can handle | Sales manager | Pays back fastest and directly increases revenue |
| The owner is drowning in paperwork and reporting | Accountant or administrator | Frees time for tasks nobody but you can do |
| Sales exist but delivery keeps slipping | Delivery or production staff | Otherwise growing sales only increases the number of unhappy clients |
| Several business areas, all resting on the owner | A head for one of the areas | More expensive, but removes a whole block of responsibility rather than tasks |
A common mistake is hiring a general assistant first. Such a person takes on small tasks but does not own outcomes, so the owner stays under the same operational load, just with an extra cost line.
The owner of a small manufacturing company postponed hiring a sales manager for eighteen months: he considered 400,000 tenge a month too heavy a burden on the budget and handled clients himself between everything else.
A count showed that during that time he had declined or failed to respond to roughly twenty incoming enquiries. Even on a conservative estimate of conversion and average order value, the lost revenue exceeded the annual cost of an employee many times over.
Caution about spending cost more than taking the risk would have.
How to reduce the risk of a first hire
If the decision is hard
- Start with part-time or project work. Many functions — accounting, marketing, HR records — do not require a full day at the outset
- Consider outsourcing. HR administration or bookkeeping outsourced is noticeably cheaper than an in-house employee when volumes are small
- Agree criteria in advance. What the person should demonstrate within three months — in numbers, not impressions
- Set aside a reserve for 3–4 months of pay. Hiring on the assumption that the role "will pay for itself from month one" creates pressure that hinders both you and the employee
- Set up probation correctly — with the condition in the employment contract and clear assessment criteria
In brief
It is time to hire if you are turning down orders, drowning in operations, the team systematically works overtime, or the business rests on one irreplaceable person. Before opening a vacancy it is worth checking whether the task could be solved by better processes or redistribution, and calculating the payback point — that protects against hiring "just in case".