For SMB owners, wearing multiple hats is just a normal part of getting a business off the ground.
In the early days, it’s common to handle everything yourself.
After all, taking the DIY approach—from ordering inventory to bookkeeping, doing your own marketing and sales—helps keep costs down. Plus, it ensures you have complete control over your business.
The problem? As your business grows, the question is no longer whether you can do everything yourself, but whether you should.
That’s because, as your business becomes busier, every hour you spend on routine administrative work is an hour you can’t spend on higher-value activities like developing new products or services, winning new customers, or planning your next stage of growth.
This is known as opportunity cost—the value of what you give up when you focus on lower-value tasks, instead of the work that creates the greatest returns.
Below, we’ll share some small business hiring strategies. We’ll start by recognizing when it’s time to hire, identifying the types of roles that produce excellent ROI, and exploring financing options that can help you bring on new employees when opportunity knocks on the door.
How to Know When It’s Time to Stop Doing Everything Yourself
Let’s be clear: as a small business owner, there will always be duties that require your involvement.
But when too much of your time is spent on day-to-day operations instead of high-impact work, you can become the very thing limiting your SMB’s growth.
Here are a few examples:
- A retailer spends hours stocking shelves instead of negotiating with suppliers.
- A restaurant owner covers shifts instead of using that time building profitable catering partnerships.
- A consultant uses their evening hours preparing invoices instead of strategizing new service packages.
Day-to-day tasks like stocking, covering shifts and invoicing certainly help keep a business moving.
But they rarely create the same lasting value that comes from investing time in strategy, business development, and relationships.
This is a common challenge amongst entrepreneurs.
In fact, one recent study estimates SMB owners spend on average 36% of their work weeks doing administrative tasks. Another report says that business owners spend roughly 77 workdays every year doing work that could be delegated.
Put another way?
The more your business depends on you to handle every task, decision, and problem, the more likely you are to become its biggest constraint.
And over time, the opportunity cost of DIY’ing everything adds up—big-time.
Estimating the Value of Your Time
Here’s a simple way to estimate just how much you lose when you do too much yourself as an SMB owner.
- Estimate your annual business revenue.
- Estimate how many hours per year you spend on strategic revenue-generating activities such as sales, pricing, partnerships, business development, or expansion planning.
- Divide your annual revenue by your annual strategic hours.
Your total dollar amount provides a rough estimate of the value your business creates when you’re focused on high-impact work.
Next, ask yourself this question:
What could happen if even half of the time you currently spend on admin or operational tasks were redirected toward winning new customers, building partnerships, or developing new services?
Granted, no simple calculation can predict the answer. But this exercise can help you realize the real cost of doing everything yourself: the opportunities you miss by not spending more time on high-value work.
Once you start looking through that lens, the question shifts from “Can I afford to hire someone?” to “Can I afford not to?”
Of course, recognizing it’s time to hire is only half the equation. To ensure the strongest return on your investment, you also need to do some SMB delegating, and hiring for the right role.
Hiring Strategically: Understanding Multiplier vs. Stabilizer Roles
When it comes to hiring, you never want to approach it willy-nilly.
To get the best high-impact, long-term value from any new hire, you need to be strategic, even as you plan to hire.
Here’s why: not every employee creates value in the same way.
One useful way to evaluate your hiring decisions is by separating potential roles into two broad categories:
First, there are multiplier roles. These are the people who directly increase your SMB’s ability to generate revenue by bringing in new customers, boosting sales, improving profitability, and opening new markets.
Then there are stabilizer roles. These are the employees who protect your most valuable resource: your time. By taking lower-value work off your plate (administrative, operational, and repetitive tasks), stabilizers allow the owner to spend more time on activities that drive growth and generate revenue.
To help explain these roles further by industry, check out the table below:
| Industry | Types of Multiplier Roles | Types of Stabilizer Roles |
| Personal & Professional Services | Account Manager, Business Development Manager, Senior Consultant, Marketing Specialist, Licensed Practitioner | Office Administrator, Executive Assistant, Virtual Assistant, Client Services Coordinator, Bookkeeper |
| Food & Hospitality | Restaurant Manager, Executive Chef, Catering/Events Manager, Bar Manager, Sales & events Coordinator, Executive Chef | Scheduler, Shift Supervisor, Inventory Coordinator, HR Coordinator, Payroll Administrator |
| Retail | Store Manager, Sales Manager, Ecommerce Manager, Visual Merchandising Manager, Commercial Sales Representative | Administrative Assistant, Customer Service Representative, Inventory Coordinator, Purchasing Coordinator, Bookkeeper |
| Trucking & Logistics | Fleet Manager, Operations Manager, Business Development Manager, Dispatcher, Logistics Coordinator | Fleet Administrator, Compliance Coordinator, Payroll Administrator, Office Administrator, Customer Service Representative |
To be clear, both types of hires can produce an excellent return on investment. The difference is how they create that return.
Hiring for Maximum ROI: Choosing the Right Roles
There’s no universal formula for how to hire employees for a small business.
Rather, the right decision for your SMB depends entirely on what’s currently limiting your business growth.
As you plan your next hire, consider asking yourself:
- Where does work consistently pile up?
- Which recurring bottlenecks slow down customers, projects, or revenue generation?
- Which duties consume the majority of my time every week?
- Which responsibilities genuinely require my expertise?
- What could someone else perform successfully, given the right training?
Once you’ve identified your biggest constraint, think about how you’ll measure success after hiring. For example, will the new hire:
- Enable your SMB to serve more customers?
- Improve sales conversion rate?
- Reduce customer wait times or project delays?
- Free up your time, enabling you to focus more on strategy, networking, and growing the business?
- Reasonably pay for itself within the next year or so?
Remember, hiring isn’t simply about reducing your workload. It’s about increasing your business’s overall capacity to grow.
If you’re evaluating potential hires, our guide on small business hiring explores additional considerations around recruitment, onboarding, and building successful teams.
Don’t Let Cash Flow Delay the Right Hire
Your ideal employee won’t necessarily still be available six months from now. Sometimes, you need to act quickly and put out the offer.
Many SMB owners prefer to wait until they have a comfortable cash flow. However, doing so sometimes means missing out on the opportunity that would have strengthened your financial position in the first place.
Indeed, putting off hiring can have real consequences, including:
- Lost sales due to slower responses to customer enquiries.
- Missed contracts because your SMB doesn’t have the resources to take on additional work.
- Slower customer service, which negatively affects customer loyalty and repeat business.
- Increased owner burnout from carrying too many responsibilities for too long.
In many situations, the cost of delaying the right hire may even exceed the cost of paying their salary.
This is where alternative financing can help, by providing flexible and fast access to working capital when high-impact hiring opportunities emerge.
With approvals in as little as 24 hours, alternative financing can help SMB owners move quickly when the right candidate—or the right opportunity—appears.
Grow Beyond DIY: Take Action on High-Impact Hiring With Bitty
Business growth doesn’t come from doing everything yourself.
Rather, it comes from a solid small business staffing strategy that creates the capacity for your SMB to do and achieve more.
The right hire doesn’t just take work off your plate. They give you the time, expertise, and resources to pursue new opportunities, serve more customers, and continue growing.
That’s why hiring should be viewed as an investment—not simply another business expense.
Of course, even when the business case is clear, cash flow can make timing difficult.
That’s where Bitty can help. We provide the financing to invest with confidence in high-impact hires when the opportunity arises, rather than waiting until it passes.
Ready to take your business to its next stage of growth? Contact the Bitty team today to discover how our revenue-based financing and fixed-fee business loans can help you make the right hire at the right time.
