A growing business reaches a point where it decides to bring someone new in. According to the booklet, two things decide whether that step will grow the business or shrink it: what is ready before the person arrives, and the order in which you hire. Hiring in the wrong order raises cost without raising income, and a person who arrives unprepared wastes weeks before producing anything.
What has to be ready before the first day
The source sets the timing first, and it is the detail most small businesses miss. According to the source, most of what a new person needs is ready before they enter, and not on the first day or as you go along.
It also words the first action with no room for interpretation, and that action comes before training and before any explanation. The action is a place: a specific, fixed place to sit, to keep their things, and where they are in nobody's way.
According to the booklet, that holds even for a business that works entirely in the field. A place can also be a folder of their own, a phone number of their own or a toolbox of their own.
Suppose a garage whose new mechanic arrived without any toolbox of his own. He spent two months borrowing from the other two mechanics, and all three grew irritated.
Or an office that hired a new employee and gave her no email address. She worked out of the owner's inbox for two weeks, unable to tell which messages were hers and which were his.
And the case the other way round: the same office next time, with everything ready in advance. The new employee produced something on her second day.
Real work, straight away
The source gives a whole sequence of induction actions, and the booklet translates it for a small business. Above all of them, though, it stresses one action: getting the new person to do some specific work from the start.
That means specific work, and right away. Two weeks of reading up and getting familiar do not count.
The source closes the subject in a single line: “Putting a new person in order is to have a new staff member.” It goes on to warn that whoever neglects this invites a disorderly future for the new person.
Suppose a business that took someone on and told him to watch for a week and learn. A week later he still did not know what to do, and felt awkward asking.
The same business next time gives the new person a real task on the first day. Within two days he understands what is expected of him.
Or an installer who handed a new employee a three-line role description on a sticky note. A proper document would have been better, and the note still beat having nothing by a wide margin.
The wrong order shrinks
Here the source warns of something you would not expect, that hiring itself can shrink a business: “Wrong sequence will contract an org while trying to expand it.”
According to the source, the reason is that the organisation goes out of balance and ends up with noisy units that do not produce. In the opposite direction, a business that staffs in the correct sequence gives income a chance to keep pace with the new additions to the staff.
The booklet reads this as an economic point as much as an organisational one. The role you add first decides whether income keeps up with cost. Someone who neither produces nor frees you to produce raises cost without raising income, and that is how a business shrinks while it grows.
Suppose an owner who hired a personal assistant before he hired anyone to carry out the delivery work. Costs went up, and the volume of work reaching customers stayed flat.
And the case the other way round: the same owner in reverse order. He hires someone to deliver first, income rises within two months, and only then is the assistant justified.
Or a studio owner who hired a second designer before anyone was bringing in work. In practice both of them ended up working half time.
When one person replaces another
The booklet moves to a nearby case: someone leaves, and someone else takes their place. The source gives two rules.
The first says a change of post always means a review of the post. According to the booklet, a replacement is the best opportunity to find out what the role includes, because only then does someone have to say it out loud.
The second warns against leaving the handover to the two people alone. If the person leaving is the only one who brings the replacement up to speed, the source says, the whole organisation begins to slide into strange new patterns. What gets passed on is what the leaver remembers and wants to hand over, which is not always what the role requires.
Suppose an office where the employee who was leaving spent a week briefing her replacement. Half a year on, three things surfaced that she had never mentioned.
Or an owner who sat for half an hour with both of them and wrote down everything the role included. Three of the items were not even known to him.
This chapter of the booklet has two exercises, one on the day before and one on the order, and the full induction sequence appears there. The next chapter answers what to fix first when everything breaks at once.
A new person can grow the business or shrink it. The difference is mostly settled before they arrive, in what was prepared for them and in their place in the hiring order.