You hire because you’re drowning, stretched too thin and doing too much, telling yourself that once this role is filled you’ll finally be able to breathe, and then somehow hiring makes you drown faster because instead of relief you get more meetings, more questions, more coordination, and more decisions landing back on your desk, leaving you thinking that six months ago you had fewer people and somehow less chaos, and that experience isn’t because your team is failing or because you’re bad at delegation, it’s because of what hiring actually does to a small business and what most leaders never plan for; most CEOs assume hiring works like subtraction—add a person and remove pressure—but hiring doesn’t subtract work, it redistributes it, and redistribution creates friction in the form of new handoffs, new dependencies, new decisions, and new points where work can stall, so instead of fewer problems you end up with different ones that boomerang back to leadership when structure hasn’t caught up; before growth, work lives in a few heads, usually yours, but after hiring that same work fragments across roles and becomes dependent on alignment instead of memory, creating invisible work like clarifying expectations, aligning priorities, and translating context that no one puts in a job description yet someone still has to carry, and early on that someone is usually still you; at the same time roles scale faster than clarity, so people get titles and responsibilities but decision rights lag behind, leaving managers who manage tasks but don’t own outcomes, teams that execute but escalate every decision, and leaders who constantly “run things by you,” which looks like growth from the outside but feels like drag on the inside as accountability wobbles not because people don’t care but because ownership hasn’t kept pace with headcount; as the company grows, capacity technically increases while visibility into that capacity decreases, so leaders stop clearly seeing who’s overloaded, who’s underutilized, where skills are wasted, and where work is bottlenecked, and decisions start getting made based on org charts, job titles, proximity, or who’s loudest rather than reality, which leads to more check-ins, more meetings, and more centralized control, making scaling feel like regression instead of progress; this is why growth often feels heavier rather than lighter and why burnout shows up across leadership and teams, not as a personal failure but as a predictable outcome of businesses that grow without changing how they see work, map capacity, assign ownership, or design leadership layers, because scaling doesn’t feel hard because you hired, it feels hard because hiring exposes what you haven’t built yet, and the friction you’re feeling isn’t random, it’s patterned; what actually helps isn’t more people, better job descriptions, or another quick re-org, it’s understanding where growth reliably creates friction, what typically breaks as headcount increases, and what kind of leadership the business actually needs at each stage so you can stop reacting to symptoms and start fixing the underlying structure, because growth isn’t supposed to feel like drowning, but it does require you to build differently as you scale, and if every hire feels heavier instead of lighter that’s not a signal to stop growing, it’s a signal that the way work, ownership, and leadership are structured hasn’t caught up yet, and what makes scaling sustainable isn’t more people but better visibility, clearer ownership, and systems designed to grow with you.