What got you here—in terms of your approach to staffing—won’t get you there. There are some staffing strategies that are absolutely the right choice in the early days, but they are a mistake, later.

I’m going to describe the differences in what kind of people you hire by picturing three different stages, but the truth is that each change is very incremental. It’s just that you realize the different strategy required in three very specific “dawn on me” moments, and so that’s how I’m going to describe them.

Early Days: “What We Can Pay”

In this first stage, every hire is driven by what you can afford, which isn’t much. You hire people who are:

• Cheap.
• Inexperienced.
• Blank slates (tabula rasa) who can be trained with your way of doing things, and your point of comparison is how much slower they are than you were. Or at least how fast you think you were. Memory can play some interesting tricks, here.
• Eager, fresh, dedicated, glad for the opportunity.
• Generalists. They are newer to the industry and haven’t landed in a groove, yet, or all their experience is at small firms where being a generalist was how you contributed.
• Hard working, and “all in this together.” Late nights, lots of fun stories, inventing water on the way down as you all held hands and jumped into an empty concrete swimming pool together.
• Smiling with you when you call the office on your drive back, admitting “you’ll never guess what I just promised we could do, and by Monday.”
• Family. That’s how you think of them.

Middle Days: “What We Need”

You’ll appreciate the people I’ve just described, but you realize that they can only take you so far. You’rebecoming the bottleneck because you are the smartest person there and you have to see everything before it goes out (or you’re just a control freak). But there are one or two people who carryover to the second stage, and I’ll describe them, first:

• They have done everything, and gladly accept any challenge.
• Super loyal.
• Some of your requests of them have spilled over into the personal: pick up the kids at school when a call goes late, for example.
• They get invited to family gatherings and you go to their weddings.
• They know more about your personal life than other employees do.

But beyond those one or two “power position” people, here’s what this middle group looks like:

• Slight upgrades in terms of talent. You’re paying them a little bit more and the difference is refreshing.
• Their experience is only a year or two, though, and it’s from one place where they learned all the good and bad habits, and bring both with them.
• This crew expects a more formal relationship with the firm: performance reviews, benefits, and a career path.
• You begin to dream about the day when you are less essential to the firm, and it feels like you’re beginning to run a company.
• You begin to take time off: not enough, but it’s a good start.

These people are a mix of family and team.

Later Days: “What We Can Learn”

This final stage has you realizing something for the first time: your job means that you’re always on the lookout for great people, and also that same great people are actually more important than great clients. You have stepped away from the work and now you’re a manager and leader. You’re becoming more self-aware and you read a few management books and probe older mentors about their approach.

The biggest noticeable difference is that now you’re hiring for competence, and money is secondary, because it’s the best way to institutionalize your firm’s philosophy. Instead of generalists who do a passable job at a lot of things, you hire people with a deep expertise in something very focused.

You can put them in front of clients without any anxiety. And when they talk, you learn things, just like the client is learning.

But there are two big changes in individual people in this phase, one at the low end and one at the high end:

• You move on from that very first employee you hired. The one who did every early job, and eagerly shares that with every new employee hired. It’s a status thing for them, and while they have been pushed aside with every expert hire, they can still cling to that memory. But since they don’t have the deep expertise that the newer team members have, they define their significance by their closeness to you, the principal. They try to maintain this by acting like a Chief of Staff who controls access and information, and eventually you’ll grow tired of it.
• You experiment by hiring the most expensive employee ever, and that first attempt fails. Your expectations are too high, the person who comes doesn’t know how to operate in a more entrepreneurial environment where they can’t delegate everything, and they’ll go back to the big, spoiled life fairly quickly. The second big hire works, though, because you learned a lot from the first one.

This is a team and not a family. A well-oiled one, where no one can yet “quit and stay.” Gaps in competence are glaring and addressed. You’ve learned to let go and have better, earlier, more courageous conversations to keep things on track.

People in this group think more like owners, they can lead clients with ease, and they can manage entire pitches without you having to come home early from vacation.

Finally

What stage are you in? Your approach to people needs to match your firm’s maturity level.