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Business PlanningOngoingDecision

First Hire: Employee, Contractor, or Wait?

Decide whether the work piling up needs your first employee, a contractor, or a process fix — before you take on payroll and everything that comes with it.

What you walk away with

A made decision — plus a shareable summary capturing what you chose, the reasoning behind it, what you ruled out, and what would make you revisit it. There's no document to build here: the thinking is the deliverable.

12 steps in the full journey.

The first 3 questions

This is where the conversation starts. Each answer shapes what gets asked next.

  1. 01What's driving the hiring urge — what work is piling up, what's getting dropped, and what would you hand off tomorrow if someone great appeared?
  2. 02Where's the business — revenue, growth, runway — and what could you actually afford: a salary, a contractor budget, or neither without cutting something?
  3. 03Have you hired or managed people before — employees, contractors, agencies? How did it actually go?

+ 9 more questions across discovery, validation, and the creative brief — each one adapting to what you've already said.

Ready to work through it?

The first five questions of any project are free — no card required.

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