Hiring feels like the logical move
Hiring usually feels like the obvious next step. You’re in more meetings than before, and decisions still seem to pass through you more often than they should. You end up reviewing things that, if you’re honest, you expected would already sit elsewhere by now. At the same time, nothing is really breaking. Revenue is fine. The team is solid. So there isn’t a clear signal that something is wrong. And so, naturally, you hire. That makes sense. It often works. But, you know, not always for the reason people think.
What worked keeps running longer than it should
Early on, there isn’t much to organise. There are too few layers for structure to really matter, so everything stays close to the founder. Decisions move quickly because the context is concentrated. That’s what gives the company speed in the first place. And honestly, it works. It keeps working longer than you’d expect. Which is where it gets tricky. Because when something keeps working, even slightly imperfectly, it’s easy to assume it was set up that way on purpose, even if it wasn’t.
Experience doesn’t automatically shift decisions
At some point, you bring in someone experienced. A Head of Sales, a VP Product—someone who should be able to take real ownership. They’re good. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be there. And still, certain decisions keep finding their way back to you. Not everything, but enough to notice. Enough that you stay more involved than you had planned. At first, that feels normal. You’re faster. You see things others don’t yet see. Stepping in feels efficient. But then, over time, something starts to feel slightly off. The company has grown, but your role in it hasn’t shifted as much as you thought it would.
Some organisations get lighter. Others don’t
If you look around, you start to see the difference. Similar companies. Similar hires. Yet they don’t feel the same from the inside. In one, things seem to move without constantly looping back. In the other, decisions still tend to collect at the centre. It’s not obvious why. It’s not about titles, or even about capability. It’s more about whether, at some point, someone made decisions about decisions. You know—what actually moves without you, what still needs alignment, what should no longer come back at all. If that never really happened, people step in, but the underlying dynamic stays the same.
When things feel heavier, attention shifts to people
At a certain point, the company just feels slower. Not in a dramatic way. Nothing breaks. But coordination takes more time. Conversations get longer. More things need checking. So the instinct is to look at people. Do we need someone stronger, more experienced, more senior? Sometimes, yes. But sometimes the issue is more structural. Decisions were never clearly relocated. They were shared, or delayed, or left slightly open. And that’s fine when things are small. As things grow, it starts to matter.
More hiring doesn’t necessarily solve it
So you add another layer. And then another. But if decisions still tend to move upward, the effect is limited. You don’t really remove complexity. You kind of spread it out, while keeping the centre intact. From the outside, the organisation looks more structured. From the inside, it doesn’t necessarily feel lighter.
A different question tends to reveal more
Before hiring again, there’s usually another question worth asking. Not so much “who is missing?” More something like: “what should already have moved away from me by now?” It’s a less obvious question, but in practice, it tends to point closer to the issue.
What this usually comes down to
Most scale-ups don’t run into problems because they lack capable people. More often, it’s about how and when responsibility actually shifts. If that shift stays unclear, new layers tend to carry work rather than remove it. If it’s handled deliberately, things start to move differently, without everything passing through the same point.
In practice
If decisions still have a way of coming back to you, even after hiring senior people, it’s probably not only about capacity. Something in the way decisions are structured hasn’t fully moved yet. And, you know, that’s easy to miss while things are still working. You usually only notice it once things start to feel heavier than they should.
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