Positioning Research

Before hiring another coordinator, find out what work shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Sometimes the team genuinely needs more hands. Sometimes the business is generating unnecessary work through poor handoffs and disconnected tools, and another hire just absorbs it.

Tell me what’s getting stuck See how Ihsan approaches it

Does this sound familiar?

This usually starts with:

“My team says they need another person.”

“The admin workload keeps growing faster than the business.”

“We lack administrative support, so things slip.”

“Adding headcount feels like the obvious next move, but it also feels expensive.”

“We get overwhelmed even though the job volume hasn’t changed that much.”

“Everyone’s busy, but I can’t point to why exactly.”

It might not be what it looks like

The question isn’t whether to hire. It’s what you’d be hiring to do.

“We’re overloaded, so we need another person” is a reasonable first read, and sometimes it’s the right one - a genuinely growing workload sometimes just needs more capacity. We’re not here to talk you out of hiring.

But before that becomes a recurring payroll decision, it’s worth knowing how much of the workload is real, value-producing work, and how much is workflow-created labor: unnecessary handoffs, duplicate entry, unclear ownership, missing system visibility, disconnected tools, or avoidable customer coordination. A new hire absorbs that second kind of work instead of removing it, which means the same friction likely shows up again at the next size.

Determining that before you hire doesn’t mean the answer is never hiring - it means the hire, if it happens, is sized around real capacity rather than around busywork nobody has questioned yet.

Our approach

Find the constraint before choosing the fix

We don’t start with a preferred technology. Once the real constraint is clear, the right move is usually one of these, roughly in order of how much change it introduces:

SimplifyStandardizeConfigureConnectAutomateBuild

Or build nothing, if that's the right answer. We determine what should change and implement it - not just recommend it.

How we see a business

We look at the business as a connected system

A business moves through a lifecycle: Grow (turning opportunity into a customer), Flow (getting the work done and paid for), and Keep (staying in the relationship after the job ends). A problem that shows up in one place often started somewhere else in that chain.

See how we think about this

Example scenario

Hypothetical, for illustration only - not a claimed result from a real client.

What is happening

A restoration company’s office team says they’re underwater and need a second coordinator. Job files require re-entering the same customer information in three different places, and status updates get typed out manually for every open job, every day.

What Ihsan would inspect

How much of the daily workload is duplicate data entry versus genuinely new work
Which steps exist because of disconnected tools rather than because the work itself requires them
Whether job volume has actually grown, or the same volume just takes more steps than it used to

Possible interventions

Connect the systems that currently require the same information to be typed in twice
Standardize the daily status update so it doesn’t require manual composition per job
Configure existing software to do work it’s already capable of, instead of working around it

What should improve

A clearer answer on whether a hire is actually needed, and if it is, a role built around real capacity rather than absorbing avoidable busywork.

Bring the part of the business that’s stuck

Bring the workload that’s making a new hire feel inevitable. We start by understanding what is actually happening, not by pitching a fix.

Tell me what’s getting stuck

Or see how Ihsan approaches it first.