Hire The Function

The last person you hired, you didn't actually need. You needed about nine things, and hiring a person was the only way anyone had ever figured out how to buy them.

That's the argument at the center of Chapter 11 of my book, The 8-Hour Business Plan in the Age of AI, and it's the one that makes people at my coaching table go quiet. A job title is a fossil. It's a bundle of duties that got stapled into one human being because there was no other way to purchase the work. Somebody needed the invoices reconciled, the calendar defended, the follow-up written, the intake forms processed, and the weekly report built. Five things, five different skills, zero relationship to each other. So they wrote a job description, called it Operations Coordinator, and paid a salary for the staple.

Here's what changed, and why it matters this week. That constraint is gone. You can buy one function now, with no person attached, for about the price of lunch. Your other Brain runs it overnight while you sleep, and it doesn't need onboarding, a chair, or a performance review.

Run the math the honest way. In the book I walk through a function that costs around forty dollars a month against the eighteen hundred dollars a month of human time it used to eat. Those are my numbers from watching this play out with owners, not a study. And I'll be straight with you: forty isn't the real number either, because the real number includes setup, the plumbing, the upkeep, and the ten minutes a week somebody spends reading the exceptions. Total all of it. Then compare it against cost per completed outcome, not cost per hour, because hours were never what you were buying.

Most people won't do that math. They'll post the job.

I've watched small business owners make this call for twenty-eight years and I have never once seen someone regret staying lean. I've seen plenty regret the opposite. The mistake costs more now than it used to, because a hire made out of overwhelm is a hire made around a process you never fixed. Point your other Brain at a broken process and you don't fix it. You scale the mess, faster and cheaper.

You might be reading this thinking it's a payroll question. It isn't. If you're a student, a solo operator, a grad researcher, a manager with no budget to hire anybody, look again. Every time you say "I need help," you're doing the exact same thing. You're describing a role. You should be describing a function. Help is a fog. "Turn my eleven pages of interview notes into a coded theme table by Thursday" is a function. One of those you can hand off tonight. The other one you'll still be complaining about in March.

Here's the part that stings. The reason you keep describing roles instead of functions is that you've never written down what the work actually is. You can't hand off what you can't name. You are the bottleneck, and the bottleneck isn't your capacity. It's your vagueness.

So here's the one thing to do at eight o'clock tomorrow morning. Take the seat you've been thinking about filling, or the help you keep telling yourself you need, and spend twenty minutes writing the functions down as verbs and outcomes. Not titles. Verbs and outcomes. "Reconcile the card statement to the ledger and flag anything over two hundred dollars." Then go down that list and mark each line M, H, or S. Machine, human, or shared. Machine takes production. Human takes judgment, relationship, taste, accountability. Shared means you set the standard and read the exceptions while your other Brain runs the other ninety percent.

Then look at what's left in the human column. Just look at it.

Most of the time it doesn't add up to a job. The smartest hire you make this year is going to be the one you didn't make.

Draw the role last. That's the whole thing.

If you'd rather do this than nod at it, that's what we're building together at Ultradia.io.

#Execution #AI #SmallBusiness #Hiring #Focus #Solopreneur