Perspectives on organisation, leadership, people and technology, for owners and leadership teams.
Running one site well and running six are different jobs. Promoting on the first to fill the second is one of the most common and most expensive people decisions in a growing manufacturer.
HR usually starts as administration. The business keeps growing, the structure does not, and the symptoms show up as cost, inconsistency and slow decisions long before anyone names the cause.
Technology makes whatever process you have faster. If the process is unclear, it makes the confusion faster too. The order of the work matters more than the tool.
The honest answer is earlier than most founders expect and later than most advisers suggest. The useful question is what problem the hire is for.
The shift is less about hiring managers than about changing how decisions are made. Most of the difficult choices are about people.
Compensation conversations tend to be left until the end of a hiring process. By then, a mismatch that could have been surfaced early has become an expensive surprise.
A more expensive senior hire is not automatically a bigger cost. The comparison that matters is between total cost and total consequence, and most companies only look at the first.
When a manufacturer grows by adding sites, each site tends to develop its own way of working. The cost of that variety is easy to miss until the group needs to act as one business.
When output falls short, the instinct is to add people. Productivity is usually decided by how the organisation is designed and managed, which is a harder and more valuable conversation.