There’s a sentence that appears in almost every growing business eventually.

Usually said under pressure.

Usually said when everyone feels stretched.

Usually said with complete sincerity.

“We just need another person.”

Algarve Busy Season

Living in Portugal, you see a version of this every summer in the Algarve.  

We have the very fortunate benefit of seeing some amazing restaurants during the off peak season, relaxed, under no pressure and with fantastic food and service coming as a result.

However, when the tourist season arrives. They get immensely busier. Demand surges almost overnight.

Naturally, the restaurants respond by adding more staff.

• More serving staff
• More kitchen assistants
• More people are moving everywhere

However, interestingly, comparing the experiences at different times of the year, I often concluded that it gets worse not better.

• Service is slower
• Orders are more often mixed up
• Food quality drops
• The atmosphere changes
• Even getting the bill somehow becomes harder despite there being more staff around than ever

It is not because the staff aren’t working hard.

It is because the underlying system is under strain.

• The kitchen flow changes
• Communication becomes reactive
• New staff aren’t fully integrated
• Everyone starts compensating for everyone else

More people, but less rhythm.

Businesses behave exactly the same way.

The Hiring Trap

At first, hiring feels logical.

• More clients will lead to….
• More work and therefore you need….
• More people.

Simple?

Sometimes, hiring is absolutely the right answer.

However, this is not always the case.

There’s a huge difference between:

• hiring into a structured business, and
• hiring into a strained one.

One will create leverage, but the other creates more complexity.

The January Transfer Window Problem

Football offers another good example of this.  

Every season, you see Premier League clubs fighting relegation panic-buying players in January.

One of the clearest examples in recent years has been Everton.

• Multiple managers
• Different recruitment strategies
• Players signed to solve immediate pressure rather than fit a long-term system.

On paper, the investment increased.  However, in reality it was a short term mish mash and lacked any cohesion.

Reactive hiring often creates accumulation, not alignment.

You saw similar patterns with Leeds United during the 2022–23 season. The club signed multiple players mid-season trying to solve immediate pressure:

• new defenders
• new midfielders
• new attacking options

However, the team never developed consistency or rhythm.

The players arrived without anywhere near enough time to learn and adapt to the system, understand roles properly, or build cohesion with the squad already there.

The result? Despite increasing talent and spending heavily, Leeds were relegated anyway.

The issue wasn’t simply: “Not enough players.”  It was that the pressure inside the system was already too high and adding more people into instability rarely creates stability.

The Same Pattern Exists Far Beyond Sport

You see this in larger Companies too:

WeWork became one of the clearest business examples of this during its hypergrowth years.  Rapid recruitment became symbolic of momentum:

• more offices
• more managers
• more teams
• more expansion

However, underneath, the operational structure wasn’t mature enough to support the pace safely.

Headcount growth became confused with business health.

Eventually the complexity underneath the growth became impossible to ignore.

Growth, Pressure and Hiring

This happens surprisingly often in founder-led businesses too.

• Growth creates pressure
• Pressure triggers hiring

However, if the underlying structure hasn’t evolved yet the pressure simply spreads across more people instead of disappearing.

The Hidden Cost of Hiring

It is quite easy to calculate the salary cost of a hire.

What is harder, but more informative to the hiring decision is to calculate:

• the management load
• the communication overhead
• the training requirement
• the increase in coordination
• the additional context switching created

Every new person creates new connections inside the business.

• More conversations
• More handovers
• More dependency points

If the structure underneath isn’t strong enough yet those additions create drag instead of momentum.

Why This Feels So Frustrating

As a result of this some businesses will reach that confusing stage where:

• Revenue grows
• Team size grows
• Activity grows.

But your stress isn’t reducing.

It is likely increasing because the issue was never simply: “Not enough people.”

It was: “Too much pressure moving through an unclear structure.”

And hiring amplified it.

A Better Question to Ask

Before making the next hire, it’s worth pausing to ask: “What exactly is this person fixing?”

Not: “What work will they do?”

But: “What pressure genuinely disappears once they arrive?”

If the answer is unclear then the business may simply be layering people on top of unresolved capacity problems.

The Important Shift

Healthy hiring usually happens after:

• priorities are clearer
• delivery is more consistent
• responsibilities are better defined
• pressure points are understood

Putting this simply:

• The structure comes first
• Then the scale

Otherwise, hiring becomes an expensive way of delaying the real conversation.

What We’ll Explore Next

Next week, we’ll close this series by looking at what actually changes businesses at this stage.

It is not hustling harder.

It is not working longer hours.

It is not simply more people.

It is redesigning how the business absorbs growth in the first place.

If You Want to Understand Where Pressure Is Actually Building

One of the clearest patterns we see in our “Why Are You Busy But Not Scaling?” diagnostic is businesses trying to solve structural pressure through additional hiring.

Sometimes correctly.

However, more often far too early.

The diagnostic will help you identify:

• whether your issue is truly capacity
• where pressure is accumulating
• and whether hiring would genuinely solve it

Final Thought

More people can temporarily absorb pressure.

Only structure removes it permanently.