Ryan DeissCo-Founder & CEO, The Scalable Company

$200M Founder Answers $1M Owner Questions

15 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this monologue, the speaker addresses Ryan, explaining that hiring often hampers growth because companies add staff to already broken or undocumented processes. The typical pattern is: a business is overwhelmed, decides to hire, but lacks time to train new hires, resulting in ineffective performance, added cleanup work, and eventually higher turnover. The speaker argues that the root cause is the absence of well‑designed, documented systems. By first building and codifying operational systems, then hiring people to run those systems, businesses can scale without the slowdown. The core message is that good talent cannot rescue broken systems; instead, robust systems enable talent to be effective.

Chapters

Hey Ryan, why does the business seem to slow down when we hire more people? Simple. It's because you probably threw people at your problems instead of solving for systems first. I mean, the way this usually goes down is we're really, really busy and so we decide that we need to hire some people and so that's what we do. But because we're busy, we can't afford the time to actually train those people and so they never really get up and running and so they don't take the work off of our plate and they don't do a very good job. And so we wind up having to come back behind them, clean up, the messes, it actually creates more work for us until eventually it gets so bad that we have no choice but to fire them. And then we declare that hiring doesn't work. I guess I just have to do everything myself. If we will instead look to solve for systems first and then hire people to run those systems, that's when the process works. At the end of the day, good people don't fix broken systems. Broken systems will break your good people. Solve for systems, hire the people to run the systems. When you hire people, it's not going to slow your business down.