I get asked this question more than almost any other: should I hire someone new, or train the staff I already have?
It's a confusing question to sit with, because until you answer it, you can't make a proper decision - and that uncertainty makes owners hesitant to move at all. So here's how I actually think about it.
Don't count people. Count hours.
My answer, most of the time, is: if you're even asking the question, train first.
Here's why. Picture your best salesperson - the one who's genuinely great at selling. Now picture their actual day: some of it is spent selling, but some of it is also spent doing the books, checking inventory, handling admin. Every hour they spend on that low-effort work is an hour they're not selling - and selling is where the business actually makes money.
So before you hire a new salesperson, ask a simpler question: how many hours a day is your current best seller actually selling?
That's the test. If your best person is already spending the whole day - all of it - genuinely selling, then yes, hire. But if a good chunk of their day is going to other work - inventory, admin, accounts - the fix isn't a new salesperson. It's someone to take that other work off their plate, so the person who's good at selling gets to spend more of their day doing exactly that.
Adding people adds a new job: managing them
There's a second layer to this that owners miss. The moment you add staff, a new job appears that didn't exist before - managing them. And that job doesn't belong to whoever you hired. It belongs to you, because you're the business owner.
You can bring someone in to manage others, sure. But you still end up managing the person managing them. Eventually, as the leader, you're the connective layer holding it together - the person who has to know what's happening in every part of the business. That's a real cost of growing headcount, and it's worth being honest with yourself about before you add another person.
Systems and process do the rest
The reason a business like McDonald's can hand a burger to a low-skill new hire and get the exact same burger every time isn't the person - it's the system. A clear process lets an average hire produce a consistent, good outcome. That's what you're building toward: not just more people, but a system good enough that the people running it don't have to be exceptional for the output to be good.
Time management comes before any of this. If you can't manage your own time well, your staff won't manage theirs well either.
The rule
Simple version: if your current best seller is already selling the full day, hire another seller. If they're only selling for part of the day because other work is eating the rest, hire for that other work first - or train it away - before you add another salesperson.
Two books shaped how I think about this: The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, which is where a lot of my thinking on time management and building a sales team comes from, and The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, on systems and process.
Did you recently hire someone, or train the staff you already had? Comment on the video and tell me which one - I read every comment.