Every time growth stalled, I hired. It took me years to see why it never worked

The job spec I kept rewriting

The quarter was soft. Pipeline thin. The number on the board was lower than it should have been, and everyone in the room could feel it.

I knew exactly what to do. We needed another salesperson.

So I wrote the job spec. Again.

I’d done it before. More than once. Revenue would wobble, and my first instinct was always the same. More feet on the street. A new hunter. Someone hungry who’d go and find the growth we were missing.

It felt like leadership. It felt like doing something. Writing that spec gave me the same relief a treadmill gives you. Movement that feels like progress.

We hired. We onboarded. We handed over a target and a Pipedrive CRM login and a quiet hope that this was the missing piece.

What actually happened

The new person worked hard. They were good. And six months later the number looked almost exactly the same, except now it carried a bigger salary line.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to understand why.

The new hire didn’t inherit a system. They inherited a vacuum. There were no prescribed daily actions for them to run. No sales operating system. No rhythm of proactive customer conversations they were expected to have. No weekly accountability beyond “how’s the pipeline looking.” They were dropped into the same unstructured space as everyone else and told to go be brilliant.

So they did what everyone else did. They reacted. They chased what was loud. They said they were making progress.

I hadn’t added a salesperson. I’d added another person to a sales function that ran on individual brilliance (or lack of that) and motivation.

The thing nobody tells you about hiring

Hiring doesn’t fix a sales problem. It multiplies whatever you already have.

If your sales engine is a set of clear, prescribed, daily behaviours, then more people pours fuel on a fire that’s already burning. Every hire compounds.

But if your sales engine is “everyone sells in their own way and when they get around to it,” then every hire just scales that. You pay more money to spread the same disorganisation across more desks. You scale chaos.

Here’s the part that stung. I had built operating processes and systems into almost every other part of my business. There was a rhythm to how we ran our operations, finance, the leadership team. A clear plan on a page. The right people in the right seats. Numbers everyone could see.

The one place I never built a system was the place the money actually comes from.

What I’d do now, before hiring anyone

If I could go back, I wouldn’t write the job spec. I’d install a sales operating system first. And for this I recommend Outgrow.

It is less dramatic than it sounds. It is a small set of proactive customer conversations/actions, done every day, by whoever is doing sales or facing the customer (could be your project manager, account manager or even your delivery drivers). Calling existing customers before anything is wrong, just to ask what else you could help them with. Asking the questions that surface needs they haven’t mentioned. Reconnecting with the prospects you quoted and lost. Asking for the introduction you never get round to asking for.

A few minutes per person, per day. Logged. Reviewed once a week. Actually held to account, not just hoped for.

It works whether you are the only person selling or you have a full team. For the solo founder, it ends the feast and famine cycle of sell, deliver, look up, find the pipeline empty, start again. For the founder with a customer facing team, it turns a room of busy people into a predictable engine that doesn’t depend on who happens to feel motivated this week.

Get that running with the people you already have. Watch what the existing team produces when the work is structured.

Then, if you still need to hire, hire. You will be pouring fuel on something that already burns.

The hard part

The job spec is the easy decision. It feels like progress and it buys you a few months of hope.

The system is the harder decision, because it asks you to look honestly at what your current people are actually doing every day, and to admit the gap was never headcount.

I avoided that look for years. It was the most expensive thing I ever postponed.

So here is the question worth sitting with.

Where is your revenue actually stalling?

Is it a people problem, or is it that the people you have were never given a system to run?

Hit reply and tell me. If it is the second one, that is the most fixable problem in your business, and I will show you where I would start.

Sid Jashnani

Outgrow Certified Advisor

CEO, Outgrow LLC · sidjashnani.com