In this video, Peter Sorgenfrei answers a LinkedIn request about how business owners can decide when to add staff or open a new location. He separates the two decisions. For hiring, he advocates bringing on an assistant as soon as financially possible to off‑load non‑core, administrative, social‑media, and personal tasks, allowing the owner to focus on high‑value work for customers and the team. For expansion, he warns that opening a new site requires substantially more capital and long‑term lease commitments. He recommends only pursuing a new location when clear demand exists in another market and to negotiate the shortest, most flexible lease terms—even at a higher initial cost—to avoid being locked into multi‑year contracts that can cripple a business if the market test fails. The overall advice stresses early delegation of low‑value work and cautious, trial‑based geographic expansion.
Chapters
So on LinkedIn the other day, somebody asked me if I could do a video on when do you know it's time to hire additional staff, or when do you know it's time to open up a new location. And it's a question or a struggle that every business owner has to deal with. You know, things are going well, you know, there's a lot of activity in your business. Is now the time to add additional expense by opening this location or Or hiring an additional person? Those are 2 separate decisions, honestly. So if we look at hiring an additional person first, to me, I've always made the choice to hire somebody to help me do all the things that I shouldn't be doing as soon as I possibly could. And when I say shouldn't be doing, it's all those things that are not necessarily adding the most value to my customers or to the team that I'm working with. So I've resorted to essentially hiring an assistant as soon as I could afford it to help me with all the admin that there is in the business, to help me with all the social media stuff that there is in the business, to help me with a lot of personal stuff that I need to get done so that it kind of gets off my plate and gets executed. So as soon as I have been able to afford that, I've done that in my past businesses. And as it relates to opening up a new location, well, that's a little bit harder because the capital required to do that and the commitment that you kind of make because of rental agreement and leases and other things is much, much bigger. So that decision really is one to take when you're starting to see that there's a significant demand for your product or service in some other area. And then try essentially to get as short leases as possible, as flexible terms as possible, even if it's a little bit more expensive for you in the beginning, but doing that so that you can get out of it. I think a lot of businesses have suffered and eventually died because they've committed to, you know, 3 or 4-year leases on some retail space When what they should have committed to is maybe a year or half a year to try it out and see if they could be successful in that market. So those are the considerations that I would take into mind if I were considering when to hire an additional person or when to expand to a new location.
