Why Hiring More People Won't Fix Your Profit | EP 166

If your margins are tight and your instinct is to hire more people to deal with business bottlenecks, this episode is worth listening to before you do.

In this episode I break down one of the most common mistakes I see consultancy owners make: using hiring as the default solution to a profit problem. More often than not, adding headcount makes things worse before they get better — and in many cases, it is not the real issue at all.

I unpack why every new hire is a cost before it is a return, why throwing people at problems is usually avoidance of the real issue, and why the most profitable phases of a consultancy are not the growth phases — they are the consolidation phases.

I also share a real example from inside our Boardroom community. Mandy recently hit 30% net profit for the first time in her business, and she did not hire a single extra person to get there.

Inside this episode we cover:

- Why hiring reduces profit before it increases it
- Why most business problems are systems and process issues, not people issues
- How to diagnose what is actually holding your margins back
- Why consolidation phases are where real profit is built
- What Mandy did differently to hit 30% net profit

If you run an engineering or built environment consultancy and feel like margins are being squeezed no matter how hard you work, this episode will give you a completely different way to look at the problem.

👉 Check out our $10M+ Consultancy Roadmap Training. It’s a step-by-step guide to help you move from wherever you are now — whether that’s $1M, $3M, $5M or $10M and beyond — and build a business you can genuinely be proud of - https://youtu.be/qhusAlo3msw?si=JHK1JjXMMgJO08Hw