Whether you’re looking for candidates to help you enter new markets or to expand within your current areas of expertise, welcoming newcomers to your team can be one of the most exciting parts of scaling your business. However, it’s important to be intentional about whom you bring on board and when. Without significant financial foresight, hiring can end up causing a setback instead of a gain.

Luckily, a CPA can help small businesses avoid the common pitfalls associated with the scaling process. Read on to learn how financial expertise can be a key to success when you’re looking to take on new staff.  

Hiring as You Scale: A Delicate Balance  

Over our years of working with growth-driven small businesses, we’ve honed our ability to identify the hiring oversights clients fall into most often. Here are the areas where it’s easiest to slip up as you scale your team. 

Too Much, Too Fast

It can be easy to assume that a bigger team is a top priority right out of the gate — and that this expansion needs to happen fast. While it’s important to ensure your labor capacity can support growth at every level of your business, balance is vital to maintaining an appropriate hiring speed. 

Feeling like you need to expand your staff in multiple areas as soon as possible could lead to less careful consideration for each interviewee. And overaccommodation outside of your needs — and your financial bandwidth — could result in future money struggles and layoffs down the line.  

Hiring as One-off Problem Solving 

As a small business, you’ll hit bumps in the road once in a while. These difficulties may push you to search for skilled professionals who can fulfill hyper-specific growth goals. But once the current need is fulfilled and things smooth out, will these new team members be able to apply their expertise to evolving scenarios? While larger organizations have the capacity to staff for every separate possible development, this tactic can lead to bloated teams for small businesses. 

Promising Too Much or Too Little

Finally, scaling companies should know concretely what compensation and benefits they can (and can’t) offer new hires. Without this clarity, CEOs risk over or under-selling the business’s real capacity. 

The Mindset for Hiring Success

These common scaling pitfalls can be easily amended by keeping two important considerations in mind with every hiring venture: 

• Timing: Choosing an appropriate pace at which to bring new staff into the fold will help you preemptively avoid downsizing and enhance your ability to support your whole team, even if things don’t go according to plan. 
• Reasoning: Establishing a clear, long-term goal and purpose for each role in your organization will give you a perfect set of objectives to use in the interview process, and help you to build a well-rounded team.

The most efficient and effective way to keep both of these criteria at the forefront while you scale your personnel is by knowing your financial goals. Creating a detailed budget and financial plan each year is how you put your vision into concrete, attainable action — without over or underestimating how far you can go. 

Financial Advisory and Hiring: A Perfect Pair 

The good news is that planning for the future is the professional niche of any qualified financial advisor. BradyRenner has been helping small businesses do exactly that with smart financial consulting and CPA services throughout the greater Baltimore-Washington region for over a decade. After establishing budgetary, investment, and expense-related benchmarks, our team provides frequent financial check-ins to help scaling clients know whether past hiring decisions are seeing a return on investment — and if it’s a good idea to bring in new staff at any point in time. 

BradyRenner’s CPAs also give CEOs an in-depth understanding of the compensation and benefits packages they can afford to offer, helping them strike the balance between being competitive and being aware of their bottom line. No matter the hiring needs you’ll tackle in the future, new team members will feel confident in their ability to grow professionally in a stable work environment. 

BradyRenner CPAs: Your Team’s Growth Partner

BradyRenner knows the power of comprehensive financial analysis when planning your next big steps! As a local CPA firm serving small businesses of all kinds out of Bowie, MD, we’re dedicated to helping you understand the big picture through bookkeeping, accounting, and tax planning services. Outsourced CFO packages put all of these pieces together into an ongoing partnership where our staff can configure everything from pricing strategies to mergers and acquisitions – and, of course, a plan of action for hiring according to your needs and capacity.   

Our team prioritizes ongoing communication, so you’ll never feel at a loss when a decision is being made. We’re excited to see how you plan to innovate for your industry and are ready to support you in every new venture. Contact BradyRenner to get started with a forward-thinking CPA today!

In the next article in this series, we’ll explore the other side of personnel management within a small business with a look at employee retention, and the most common ways scaling companies miss the mark when it comes to keeping employees on board.