EntreLeadership - How to Scale Without Over-Hiring

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

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If you're trying to scale your business but you're not sure when it's time to grow your team, this conversation is for you. Zach Baird has built a strong company with over 30 team members, but too many key pieces of his business rely on a single person. If someone leaves, gets sick or takes time off, the whole team feels it. He knows he needs to get more help, but he's afraid of hiring before he has the revenue to sustain it. On this episode, head coach John Falcons sits down with Zach to help him determine when to make his next hire and address the missing piece that's making this decision feel risky

in the first place. Let's listen in. Well, Zach, thanks for coming and hanging out with us today. Absolutely, absolutely. Tell me a little bit about your business. Yeah, so I started the company in 2016, living in Gainesville, Florida. I was working a couple full-time jobs at the time, and also started the company grew slowly up until COVID, and actually COVID's when we grew really quickly. Okay. What do y'all do? Yeah, so we're a low voltage company. So we do cameras, access control, structured cabling, jail control systems in the state of Florida.

Did you say jail control systems? Yeah. So it's called PLCs programmable logic controllers. Basically, if you've ever been to a jail, hopefully the right side of it. I've never been to a jail. I've been to a few, yeah. But you walk in and they have a security operations area and people there are able to unlock all the doors

and control the facility from there, so we install these systems. Okay. It was actually really funny. I was at a trade show many years ago and sit next to a guy who was selling custom hats. And for two days, I got to know this guy. He has all this business, all these guys. The sheriffs are coming and talking to him and buying his hats and no one's coming to my booth, you know, because who wants to talk about cameras.

And at the end, he's like, by the way, I'm the director of IT for the local county here, the sheriff's office. We should have a conversation. I was like, oh, that's cool. So that kind of launched our way into state and local government work. Isn't that crazy how those kind of things happen? It is, yeah. So what's going on in the business right now?

What challenge are you working on? Yeah, so we're kind of like ramping back up. We had like a little lull about two years ago and some staff changes. And my team's incredible. Like we have a really great team. They've, but I've started to notice that, you know, we have lots of one-man departments. And it feels kind of like we're at a point where if you add a human,

another full-time employee onto the docket that you're going to end up with not enough work for that person, right? And also is concerning that if somebody were to have to leave or something happened to them or a sickness or whatever, that we're going to be in a really difficult place, right? Like we have one person in what we call a system design role, and they basically take all the information from the salesperson, build the quotes, and push it out. And it feels like if something were to happen to him, if you were to get sick or took another whatever, it's like, now I've got this whole role missing.

And it's not an easy job to hire for it. So it's really just a point of concern for me, right? And like him and there's several other seats in the company. If somebody were to leave, it's like, what are we going to do? You know? So that's been something that has been difficult because we're not really in a place to just go and hire one more of all these people. Okay. And there's not a lot of crossing between the roles.

So everybody's doing something completely different. completely different? They don't cross-train at all or talk to each other about how they do what they do? Obviously, there's myself and my director of operations. The two of us can pretty much do most of the seats, like most of the things of the company, right? Like we know our product stacked, we understand how to program it. We can design quotes. We can do sales. But of course, if somebody leaves us working 40 hours a week, we're already working 50. Yeah, I'm 60. Right. So, you know, taking that on would be a surmountable task. But yeah, I know we've actually really compartmentalized and maybe for better or worse. I mean, our team is really, they're really good at what they do, right?

They've gotten to be some of the best of what they do. And that's a strength for us because they're very knowledgeable, but also I think it's become a weakness because now these people do this. These people do this. It's like there's not much, not much leeway there. Tell me again, how many folks do you have on this? team total. Yeah, so we're mid 30s. Mid 30s. And you got mid 30s and everybody does something different. Well, except for the technicians. I mean, we have, yeah, so we have, we have a PM and then my director of ops does PM. We're probably going to be hiring another one of those soon. That's, that's one

that's one seat where we do have enough, you know, to kind of fill in another full timer. Okay. But I have, you know, we have finance department. That's a department of one. I've got my system design role. It's the department of one. My director of ops. It's kind of a department of one. Right, like if he's not there, I'm actually, I'm doing two jobs now. If I'm not there, he kind of does my job at the same time. And actually, we were not smart enough and didn't line our schedules. We're both out of office for three days this week. Okay.

That's going to be interesting. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully that's an anomaly. That's not every week. That's very rare. Yeah. Yeah. So I get that.

And the fact that everybody's specialized, that makes sense. But I'm curious, what's your plan or even do you want to grow the business? Like, do you want to scale to make it bigger? Right. And that's, we do. And that's actually the interesting part. Like we've come up multiple times into the, you know, getting close to $10 million in revenue, right? Okay.

And we went up ramped up and then we ended up having to ram back down. We made some mistakes along the way. That's normal? I found that it's been very difficult to like break that cusp, right? Like when you start getting to the point where we're adding all these additional people, and it's definitely a process-driven thing that we've been addressing, you know, trying to fix our processes and make them even better than they are. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, the growth is. is the goal. I mean, we had our first ramp up in 2024 or 2023, and it was pretty substantial. I mean, like, for example, 2020, we did $4,000 in revenue, and 2021, we did $4.2 million. Okay. So we had, like, pretty crazy growth. And then we had more sustainable growth the years after, but it created a lot of cracks that we, I didn't see until later. Right. So now we're trying to rebuild it the right way, being much more conservative with hiring. I mean, at that, you know, at the peak, we had like three PMs and three system designers and all this stuff. We were definitely overstaffed.

Yeah. And so now we're trying to be more methodical about it and not just like, oh, we feel pressure, like add another body, you know? Yeah. And that's been the difficult part is like, when do you pull that trigger and when do you, because we've kind of, we've monetized some of our roles too or through compensation. We're basically perform more efficiently and still put out quality of work and then you get compensated for the. that. So trying to give people ownership to be able to make more money, but then also at the same time you end up creating this, you know, okay, well, now this person's working 45 or 50 hours a week and making more money, and it's great for them. But now, like, how do we now add another

person and then kind of... It sounds like you're bumping up against that scaling problem. Yeah. And we call that stage of business, the trailblazer stage of business. And the thing that's keeping you from being able to scale is not just the this, this. role or that role, but it is, in fact, having a strategic plan, having a plan in place far enough in the future that you can look at that and you can say, this is where we're going to need to grow. This is when we're going to need to hire. And those signals should come as you compare the plan with what the reality on the ground is. And I understand, because what I'm hearing you say is you scaled a little bit before and then the business dropped off and then you had to pull back.

and that's not fun. And that'll make you conservative. Yes, right? That'll make you hesitant to make that next hire. And I can appreciate that, but the strategic plan is the thing that is the map

to say, hey, when we get to this number, we need to hire. And when we get to this number, we need to hire. And the strategic plan also will help you create the pipeline for the business, hopefully.

I suspect with the business that you're in, you're pretty dependent upon government agent, and they're investing, is that right? If you're in jails or do you have enough private sector work? We do a pretty heavy mix. So we have a lot of state and local government, then we do a lot of private schools.

We do industrial warehousing, manufacturing, multifamily. It's about half and half. Okay. We'll get right back to our episode. But first, a lot of business owners I talk to have a vision. What they don't have is capacity. You're spending your days buried in hundreds of administrative tasks like email and scheduling and travel arrangements.

Those don't require your leadership. You should be spending your time on things only you can do. That's why I recommend Belay. I've gotten to know the Belay team over the years and they understand leadership, growth, and what it takes to help business owners achieve more. Belay helps overloaded leaders carve out capacity by providing executive assistants

who help them delegate detail work. These assistants are highly vetted and based in the US, so business owners can spend more time on strategy and leading their teams. When you're not tied up with a bunch of little tasks, what could you do? If you've never thought about it, check out Belay's free resource called 15 big moves you could make this quarter if you had the capacity. You can download it for free by texting Entree to 55123. That's E-N-T-R-E to 55-123.

Now let's get back to the episode. So let me ask you, do you have, like, explain your strategic, plan for the next 18 months for the business? Sure. So I have a sales team of three right now that I manage and I'm trying to not manage that. So one of the goals is to get a, what I call bag carrying salesman, right? Somebody who carries a quota, but not the same as a regular salesperson, but also as managing the sales team. So that I can kind of pass that off a little bit and focus on more of the vision and like actually planning strategic. A little bit of information about our company. We also run on EOS. I'm sure you've heard of EOS. Yes, yes, there are a competitor.

So I mean, you know, I found out about you guys about a year and a half ago. So I got on EOS for like three or four years. But yeah, so we run we run we're on U.S. right now. And it's, it was really helpful in that restructuring. We had our decline back up. So we do have a strategic plan we built through that. Okay. And we just rebuilt it. So what does that look like for us is we're very heavy right now on building processes and turn us. so that we, when somebody asks, how do we do blank? Yeah. We can go, we do it like this.

You know, here's our knowledge based on how to do that and trying to standardize things. So our biggest things right now is we need to hire, we feel we need to hire a sales manager and we need to hire another project manager. Okay. We are feeling the pressure of a system designer. What's interesting is that as,

I don't know, every four to six months, we get more efficient with quoting. Right. So it feels like every time we get close to feeling like we need to hire another person in that role, we find a way to get a little more efficient in our quoting process and our design process. And it's like pressure relieved,

but I feel it coming to a point. Yeah, that's a short-term solution, right? Yeah. Yeah, because at some point, you've only got 24 hours in the day. You can't, right? You can only get so efficient. Right. And then the question, and that role is so productive

compared to all the other roles in our company, that it's like how you add another body on and it's like, okay, now all of a sudden you have, you know, two employees that only need to work 25 to 30 hours a week. And they're not with their jobs. so what do we do for the rest of the time? Yeah. That has been the hardest role to hire for, I think.

It's very technical, and it's also, you know, when you add somebody on, it's really a numbers game. You have to either go out and add a couple more salespeople and get them trained up quick so you can bring in that revenue or those opportunities. I don't know. It's just, it's like hiring a system designer. You've got to also go hire a bunch of salespeople at the same time. Yeah.

Well, if you could distill that all down into, like, one thing that you want to solve for. What would you say that one thing is? I need to focus on the metrics of my, like, when to hire and what revenue markers or pipeline markers make the most sense to then hire another individual. So I can go back and look at my pipeline and what my sales team pushes out.

And the pipe that they're creating say, OK, system designer, he can handle this much revenue growth. So what do I need my sales team to produce to justify that second system designer? I could probably use that metric to then justify, like, I don't need when I hire someone for them to work 40 hours exactly, because there's a be a training period too. But if I can get everybody productive enough and efficient enough, when I hire that, maybe I find out that if I hire another sales manager or another salesperson, then I'm at that limit, right, I'm right there. Yep.

And it makes sense. And I can probably see that in the numbers. Yeah. I need to go find the, I need to go put the numbers in front of me and look at that. Yep, I think that's right. And I also think, go beyond your sales guys. Right.

Go even further up in the funnel. Because how do they get the leads that they work to close? We work a lot off referrals. Okay. We're really strong referral company. We have some inbound from our manufacturers. Okay. We do have some inbound from just some light marketing that we do,

but we spend less than $5,000 a year on marketing. Okay. And most of our clients, we have a small incentive that some of our clients can't even use them like state and local, but they refer us to their friends. Well, and that's fantastic. There's nothing better than word of mouth, right? But it's hard to predict. Right.

And so when you start looking at your metrics and say, well, this is the inflection point. This is when, you know, we need to hire. I would still look at word of mouth and at the referrals that you get and ask yourself, how many referrals are we getting a month? and look at those numbers. And then what's our close rate on the referrals that we get? Because you can project into that. You can forecast into that.

So I'm just saying that because the farther upstream that you can get, right, the more advanced warning you've got on when you're going to have demand and when you're going to need to make that higher. And one of my new sales guys, he's actually focused heavily on networking, which has worked out really well for him. So he does B&I and a couple other things, which I was skeptical of when we hired him. He's like, oh, no, it's going to be great. And I'm like, go on,

go to your Friday morning meetings. And he has, and it's been actually pretty cool to see all the new opportunities he's brought into the company. So I see that there's a need to diversify an imbound. And that's a great point. Yeah. Well, I think you kind of answered it yourself, to be honest with you, because-

You walked me there. But you, creating the time, creating the margin in your schedule, to be able to focus on the vision, you know, and where you want to be, 12 months from today, where you want to be 36 months from today, that's going to help you keep from looking at each and every hire, like, can I do this one or can I do that one? Because you got stung in the past and making those decisions out of fear is, you know, not a good place to be. No, it's not. Yeah. So, yeah, that's great, though. I think this is good. We have all the numbers.

So I just need to go sit down and put them next to each other, right? There you go. You got this. I can do that. Well, thanks for hanging out with us. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. You bet. It's a pleasure. Hiring gets a whole lot easier when it's driven by a strategic plan instead of pressure. It isn't just about setting goals. It's about creating the clear foundation you need to make confident decisions before they become emergencies. What I love about this conversation is that Zach already knew the answer to his hiring problem. He just needed someone to ask the right questions and help him connect the dots.

That's exactly why working with an Ontario leadership coach is so valuable. They'll help you identify what's really holding your business back and give you a clear plan to move forward and lead with confidence. Just click the link in the description to schedule your 30-minute consultation call that's free today. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like and subscribe for more real-world leadership content. I'm your host Dave Ramsey and this is Entree Leadership.