I Don't Lay the Bricks

There's a pattern I see a lot. A business owner hires someone. It doesn't work out. They hire someone else. That doesn't work out either. After a while they start to believe they're just bad at hiring, or unlucky, or that good people are hard to find.

Almost every time, that's not what's actually happening.

The reason you keep hiring people and being disappointed usually isn't that you're hiring the wrong people. It's that there's no clear structure for them to work inside.

You hand someone a job title and hope they figure out the rest. Then when they don't, it looks like a people problem. It's not. It's a structure problem wearing a people problem's clothes.

Think about building a house. You need two different things: an architect and a builder. The builder lays the bricks, shows up every day, does the work. The architect designs the building before a single brick goes down — decides what goes where, what connects to what, what will actually hold weight.

Without a builder, nothing gets built. Without an architect, the building collapses, or it costs three times what it should, because nobody thought through the structure first.

Most businesses have plenty of builders. What's missing is the architect.

Here's how I actually sort this out when I'm looking at a business. Every gap between what a business wants and what it's actually getting comes down to one of two things: the system is wrong or missing, or the right person isn't in the role. I label every gap one or the other before I touch anything, because the fix is completely different depending on which one it is.

"Marketing doesn't work" — is that because there's no strategy for marketing at all, or because the person running it is the wrong person for it? Could be either. Could be both.

"Sales depend entirely on the owner" — that's almost never a person problem. That's a missing sales process. No process, so nobody except the owner can close a deal, because nobody else knows what closing a deal actually looks like at this business.

"Two people keep clashing over the same responsibilities" — before you conclude one of them needs to go, check whether the role was ever actually defined. A lot of people who look like they're failing are just standing in a spot nobody built a floor for.

You can't make a good call on any of this — who to hire, who to let go, who to promote — until you've separated the two. That's the work before the work. Most owners skip straight to "fire them, hire someone better" because it feels like action. It usually just resets the clock on the same problem with a new person in the seat.

My job isn't to run your team day to day, manage the campaigns, or do the accounting. My job is to build the structure — so that when the right people are in it, they can actually succeed. And once that structure exists, most of what looked like a hiring problem quietly stops being a problem at all.

I don't lay the bricks. I make sure the building doesn't fall down.