Your second hire doubled the cost. Did it double the profit?

The pattern almost every growing business follows

One person, doing a lot, efficiently. They take on more as the business grows, and they get better with experience — their cost relative to what they produce stays low, sometimes gets lower. This is the shape of most small, fast-growing, genuinely profitable businesses. It works, and it feels like it'll keep working.

Then the work becomes too much for one person. Revenue's growing, profit's growing — so you hire a second person into that team. It feels like the natural next step, because it is one.

The cost just doubled. What happened to profit?

That's the question that usually doesn't get asked with the same rigour the hiring decision got. A £30,000 salary isn't a £30,000 cost — Employer's NI and pension contributions land on top of it before the person's done a single day's work.

A real example, at the smaller end

A longstanding member of staff left — a role that had always sat flexibly between two things: social media content and product photography. Whichever needed more attention that week got it.

The business had grown, and there was a real appetite to do more with social media. So the replacement was a dedicated, full-time social media hire — not a like-for-like rehire of the flexible role that had left.

The question that's easy to skip in that moment: will social media output alone actually cover this person's cost? And what happens to the photography half of the old role, now nobody's doing it? Products that aren't photographed don't go live. Products that don't go live don't generate the revenue they otherwise would — a real cost, just a quieter, harder-to-notice one than a line on a P&L.

Do this a few times and you get bloat

One hire like this is a small, forgivable miss. The pattern is the risk — a handful of similarly reasonable-sounding hires across different parts of the business, each one individually defensible, none of them tested against a real profit goal before they were made.

It's easy to reframe this, in the moment, as building a team for the future rather than adding cost without a return. Sometimes that's genuinely true. But costs compound every year regardless of which story is the right one — and the further that fixed cost base grows ahead of profit, the further away the original target gets. If anything in the growth plan falters after that, the business isn't just back where it started. It's in a materially worse position, carrying a cost base sized for a plan that didn't hold.

How this fits the framework

Job assignment doesn't stop at campaigns and software subscriptions — it applies to people too. A role's job should be evaluated on its own terms, against a real goal, whether it's a brand-new hire or one being automatically re-bought at full cost because someone left. Most businesses do this rigorously for the hire itself, and far less rigorously for whether the role's actual output is still worth what it now costs, six or twelve months later.

This works before the decision, not just after it

Everything else on this site is about finding what's already gone quietly wrong. This doesn't have to be retrospective. The same scoring can be run on a decision you haven't made yet — is this hire actually going to move profit, or just add cost? Should you sign that agency? Will that SaaS subscription deliver the goal it's being bought for, or become another line nobody revisits next year? Worth checking before you commit, not just diagnosing after.