85 CAS Ops: First Hire = Leverage

🎯 Making Your First Hire in Your Firm: Avoid These Common Mistakes | CAS Minute

🧠 Ready to grow your firm—but not sure how to hire your first team member? In this episode, Roman shares the biggest hiring mistakes firm owners make, how to avoid them, and how to leverage your first hire for true scale—not just relief.

Whether you’re a solo CAS practitioner or leading a small but growing team, this episode breaks down the strategic thinking, role selection, and onboarding systems needed to build with confidence.

⏱️ Chapters

01:00 – Are You Really Ready to Hire? 3 Signs to Check

02:02 – What to Ask Before Starting the Hiring Process

04:00 – Why My 1099 Contractor Quit in 4 Days

05:50 – Senior vs. Junior Hire: Pros & Cons

07:10 – Set Them Up for Success: Onboarding & Expectations

09:30 – Action Steps: Prep Your First Hire for Success

📌 Your Hiring Game Plan

• List your top 5 repetitive, time-consuming tasks
• Create a 90-day outcome plan for the new hire
• Talk to 3 other firm owners and learn from their first hire experience
• Write a “Who-Not-How” hiring statement: Who can permanently take this off my plate?

🚀 Build Your Firm with Intention

Don’t hire out of panic. Hire to multiply your impact. Be bold. Be intentional.

🌐 Check us out at thefullsend.com

Thanks for listening! Come Say Hi 👋

Full Send | Accounting & Data

LinkedIn: Roman Villard, CPA
X: @FullSendCPA
YouTube: Full Send - Accounting & Data
Data Podcast: Data Fuel

Transcript

[00:00:00] After I had reached the point in my firm building journey, when I was ready to bring on some additional help, I made a massive mistake and I didn't know where to start. And so we're gonna walk through the process of how do you evaluate your first hire? How do you get it right? How do you know when the time makes sense for you?

So. Who do you hire? When do you do it, and what do you need to avoid in that process? It can be kind of daunting to understand what direction to go, and honestly, there are many directions you can go to find additional support. But as you think about growing and scaling your firm, you need additional help to help you service your clients really well.

Expand your capacity and free up the workload to get you out of the day-to-day to help you start focusing on growing the firm. If I haven't met you yet, I'm Roman founder of Full Send. I built my firm very intentionally on, on hiring really well, uh, not reactively. And today we're gonna dive deep on the decision that changes everything.

Your, your first hire. So if you're still solo or thinking about expanding or even if you have a couple of hires, this may be a really good episode to listen to for you. I.

[00:01:00] Alright, so we've got five questions to get your first hire. Right? You know, a friend of mine, a firm runner the other day, solopreneur looking to expand, texted me last week and said, Hey, I've got a question for you. I'm at a stage in my business where I'm needing to explore getting some more help on the bookkeeping side of things, And I'm looking for suggestions on how to go about finding help. I'm open to hiring overseas, but I really want to find someone I can work with that is beyond just a transactional relationship, but somebody I can trust and communicate with. Any ideas on where to start? So first you have to ask your yourself like, are you ready to hire?

Alright, so what's the checklist there? Is your capacity stretched check? Is your revenue somewhat predictable to be able to bring somebody on board check? Are you turning down work or missing growth opportunities? Yep. Probably means we need to hire. If you're hiring out a panic, you. You probably need to stop you, that that'll really set you up for churn on the employee side, potentially client side.

And so the test here is, are your [00:02:00] processes documented? Do you have enough systemization in your firm to be able to onboard somebody well, to keep the level of service that you expect? If not, if you're hiring into an environment without process documentation, you may be multiplying chaos. And so the questions I posed back to this individual who texted me was, Hey, is this person gonna be client facing?

Did time zones matter? Do you want them full-time, part-time fractional? When you say transactional relationship, what type of things would you want slash need to communicate? After a few responses that I got from the individual, we learned, alright, this person's not client facing time zone don't, doesn't matter.

And really looking for somebody part-time, even just like five to 10 hours a week, could be really helpful. So my initial response to that was like, Hey, if, if this is really only five to 10 hours a week, is there an opportunity to automate or systematize more efficiently to recapture that five hours on your own?

So it's more of a rhetorical question like, are there opportunities in your existing [00:03:00] processes that you can look at to say, Hey, if I tweaked how I. Message this, or if I modified a system to help with, document gathering or maybe analysis or reporting. Are there better ways that I can. Continue to maintain the same level of consistency and excellence in service while freeing up a little bit more of my time without having to hire somebody right away.

And so like that, that's where my first thought goes. If it's, if you're really looking for somebody part-time, 10 hours and under, you probably have an opportunity to systematize things a little bit more efficiently. That said, when you bump up to like the 20 hours a week, 40 hours a week, now you need to understand like, okay, are you ready to hire capacity?

If revenue predictable, turning down work like check, check, check. Now we need to look at what role actually creates the most leverage in your firm. When I first started hiring, I thought, Hey, I need a role that can just be a doer. Somebody that can come in and just. Get things done, do the reconciliation, send out reporting, [00:04:00] and my first foray into that was hiring a 10 99 contractor.

So I brought on a contractor and this individual told me, Hey, this is perfect for me in my current stage of life. I really just want this like 20 to 30 hours a week. If it's not consistent, that's okay. Um, I'm not looking for anything full-time right now, and it was the perfect situation. And so we came to an agreement.

We started to get onboarded and learn new clients, and I kid you not, four days later, the individual reached out with an email just cold, said, Hey, I found a full-time opportunity. Sorry, I'm out. Pause, devastation. First hire. I was, I, I didn't know what to do. I was like, what do you mean you just, you just told me that this was a perfect situation for you.

Turns out it wasn't. It turns out I was somewhat duped and, and I just felt, uh, humiliated. I, I felt like I'd done something wrong, um, when in reality that that just wasn't the right hire for me. And so while I went [00:05:00] for somebody that could come in and get the work done early on, what it made me reflect on was like.

If I'm looking at what type of role makes the most sense when hiring, what can create the most leverage and most default to the doer, most default to the junior bookkeeper, somebody in the weeds, somebody who can conquer the work early on. So then you can kind of like step back a little bit. Now here's the challenge with that, that I ultimately learned and then, you know, on down the road, found somebody in this seat.

If you hire a junior bookkeeper, if you hire a lower level individual with not as much transactional experience, you're gonna become their manager. You're still stuck in the weeds. So what's the better play here? You wanna hire somebody who's capable of independent thinking, capable of making decision, not just completing tasks.

So some options here, you could hire an ops or admin person to free up your calendar and your brain to focus on the client service. You could hire maybe more of a senior accountant or controller to. [00:06:00] Offload the client delivery or you go even higher level and somebody that's willing to dip down from transactional all the way to, to strategic and bring on a director level individual.

Now, there are cost considerations that come with that. It is expensive to hire higher level first, however, it will be what gives you the most leverage to step back work alongside of somebody. And continue to deliver a high quality service. So if you're capable of kind of running on razor's edge for a little bit from a profitability, I can almost assure you that that would be the better long-term play.

If you envision scaling your firm beyond just 1, 2, 3 people, I. So the big debate is really just senior versus junior. A junior hire, we've got lower costs, requires more oversight. Hey, this could be good for firms that have a high degree of SOPs. They've got a lot of time to train. But honestly, I haven't met many firms like that.

If you go the senior hire route, it's expensive, but it adds a lot more stability, a lot more [00:07:00] strategy, and more often than not, you get what you pay for. So this is ideal if you wanna stay outta the day to day and focus on growth. And for me, like. Top down or management down hiring works. Start with somebody you don't have to manage.

Then build beneath them. It really allows both of you all to expand exponentially faster than hiring the lower level individual. So how do we think about setting them up to succeed? You really have to start defining what their first 90 days looks like. What are the. Outcomes that they are responsible for, outcomes that you desire, not the tasks that should be completed.

How do you pair them up with a process? How do you help them create process, loom videos, checklist, building a notion or a wiki for your firm? How do you do what you do? How do you message. What you do and then start setting up weekly one-on-ones. You should be communicating with this person early and often.

You can't just hire this person and ghost them and just, uh, trust that they will go on to manage everything the way that you would do it, because ultimately, like they're not gonna do that. But if you don't have time to [00:08:00] onboard, you probably shouldn't be hiring yet. So what traps do you need to avoid when evaluating this hire you?

You can't just hire because you're starting to get tired. You're starting to get overwhelmed. You need to get leverage, not relief. If you're just getting relief, that relief will just compound in the future to where you'll just have more stress on your plate because you're not actually getting leverage outta the situation to take what you've built and build upon it.

You're just kind of building these, uh, foundational layer bricks without the mortar. You should avoid over hiring. One great person is gonna be way better than two half fits. That said, it may be a little bit more expensive, but it will be worth it if you underpay. That's another trap. You will likely pay for it in rework, in turnover, in lost momentum, in having to oversee the individual coaching, training, the ongoing work that comes with potentially underpaying somebody who may not be at the right level.

Lastly, which is this is very difficult to accomplish in a small firm. But if you [00:09:00] have vague roles, you may create confusion, you may compound confusion, wherein in reality, clarity and and role definition helps a tremendous amount. When you're first starting to hire now, you're gonna document all this.

You're gonna get prepared, you're gonna. Have an onboarding plan, and ultimately, like it may unravel pretty quickly. However, if you have that plan in place, it's okay if it modifies it's o. It's okay if it shifts over time, but ultimately you just want to have something in place to help them be successful from the beginning, knowing that at a small firm, it's going to change.

So action steps. If you can list your top five time consuming, repeatable tasks that will help you understand where you should hire. And at what level? Ask yourself like, who can I hire that would remove these from my plate permanently? Not having to go back and review all of these things every single time it happens, but permanently get it off your plate to create leverage.

Do you have a 90 day outcome plan? Write that out, and then go talk to three [00:10:00] other firm owners who made their first hire and ask what they would do differently. Exactly what my friend did when they texted me and said, Hey. How would you think about this? What options exist? I would like to learn from you because you've been there Fundamentally, your first hire is a leverage play. This isn't a status badge. Like a lot of people like to ask, how many people do you have in your firm? Is it as if that's some metric that they judge you on? Ultimately, you're trying to get leverage. If you get it right, it could accelerate everything.

Delivery sales systems, even your sanity. If you get it wrong, it's gonna drag you deeper into the waters and you might not have a life. Boat. So be intentional, be bold. Build a team that that frees you to take the lead of the firm that you want to build. I hope that's helpful. We're gonna hit more on this and other topics next time on Cas minute.