The Constraint Nobody Forecasts: Why I Hire Managers Before the Pain Shows Up

Note: This story was written with AI assistance and edited by me.

Note: An earlier version of this piece, "Hire Managers Before You Need Them: What Scaling 10x Taught Me," was published on DEV.

People often ask me what I learned from helping a software consulting company grow roughly tenfold in under three years. Most of them expect an answer about sales. Sales mattered, of course. But the lesson that has stayed with me the longest is about people, and specifically about managers.

The biggest constraint on our growth was not demand. It was leadership capacity. The fix was to hire and develop managers before we felt we needed them. I carried that lesson into building a fully remote consultancy of my own, and it has held up again and again.

How Growth Quietly Breaks the Org Chart

In the early days of a services firm, the founders or partners do almost everything. They sell, they scope, they staff, they solve client problems and they mentor the team. For a while, that works well. Then it stops working, and the change is easy to miss.

The breaking point rarely arrives with a single dramatic event. It shows up as a series of small problems:

1. Response times start to slip.

2. Senior people spend their days in status meetings instead of doing the work only they can do.

3. A client escalation lands on your desk that someone else should have caught a week earlier.

4. New hires feel lost, because nobody has time to onboard them properly.

Each of these feels minor on its own. Together, they are a signal that the organization has outgrown its leadership structure.

The hard part is timing. By the time you see the problem clearly, you are already behind. Hiring a good manager takes time. Getting that manager up to speed takes more. If you wait until the pain is obvious, you can spend months operating in a degraded state, and growth stalls at exactly the moment the market is offering you an opportunity.

Thinking About Leadership as Capacity

The most useful mental shift I made was to treat leadership like any other kind of capacity that needs planning.

Every manager can effectively support a limited number of people and a limited number of client relationships. The exact number depends on how complex the work is, how experienced the team is and how mature your processes are. But it is always finite.

When most companies plan for growth, they forecast revenue and headcount. Far fewer forecast management capacity. Yet if you plan to double your delivery team in a year, you will need roughly double the leadership bandwidth to support it. If nobody plans for that, the existing managers absorb the extra load until they burn out or quality starts to drop.

So I began treating management capacity as a leading indicator. If we expected to add a certain number of people over the next two quarters, the managers to support them needed to be in place, or at least in the pipeline, before those new hires arrived.

Why Hiring Ahead Feels Wrong, and Why It Usually Is Not

Hiring managers ahead of need feels uncomfortable, and the discomfort is not irrational. Managers are expensive. In a services business, they may not be fully billable. When cash is tight, adding overhead before the revenue arrives looks like a risk.

Over time, I came to see the opposite risk as the larger one. Without enough managers, you cannot onboard people well. You cannot keep quality consistent. You cannot give clients the attention that earns renewals and referrals. Under-managed growth is fragile growth. Every new client becomes a potential fire, and fires consume far more senior time than prevention ever would have.

The answer is not to build a full management layer years in advance. It is to make the investment deliberately and stay one step ahead, with a clear view of when the next leadership role will be required and a plan to fill it in time.

Two Sources of Managers, and Why You Need Both

Managers come from two places: people you grow internally and people you bring in from outside. In my experience, a healthy firm uses both.

Internal promotions are powerful. The people you promote already understand your culture, your clients and your standards. Promoting from within also shows the rest of the team that there is a path forward, which helps retention.

But a promotion should not be a reward for being a strong individual contributor. The skills are different. A brilliant engineer may not enjoy coaching, planning and handling difficult conversations, and may not be good at them. Before making that move, I learned to ask two questions. Does this person actually want to lead? And have they already been leading informally?

External hires bring something different: experience at a larger scale. When you are about to grow into a size you have never operated at, it helps to have people who have already seen what that looks like. They bring patterns, processes and judgment that would take years to develop internally.

The best results came from mixing the two. Experienced outside leaders helped shape the systems, and internally promoted managers kept the culture strong.

A New Manager Needs Support, Not Just a Title

Hiring or promoting a manager is the beginning, not the end. New managers need support, especially in a fast-growing firm where expectations keep shifting. A few practices made a real difference for me.

Define the role clearly. What decisions does this manager own? What do they escalate? How is success measured? Ambiguity at the management level spreads quickly to the whole team.

Give them a real onboarding. Managers need context on clients, financials, people and priorities. Throwing a new manager into the deep end and hoping they swim wastes their potential.

Create forums where managers learn from each other. Peer learning among managers is one of the fastest ways to spread good practices and catch problems early.

Coach them on the hard parts. Most new managers struggle with the same things: giving direct feedback, delegating instead of doing, and saying no to clients or to leadership. Talking about these openly helps.

Why Remote Work Raises the Stakes

In a fully remote company, managers carry even more weight. There is no hallway, no lunch table and no chance to notice that someone looks stressed. Communication has to be intentional, and managers are the ones who make it intentional.

Remote managers need to be strong writers and consistent communicators, and they need to build trust without being physically present. They need to run effective one-on-ones, notice when engagement drops and create clarity across time zones.

When I built a remote consultancy, I paid close attention to these skills during hiring. A remote manager who struggles with communication can leave an entire team adrift, and it can take weeks before anyone realizes it.

Signals That You Are Already Late

If you are wondering whether you need more managers right now, these are the signs I learned to watch for:

• Founders or senior partners are involved in day-to-day delivery decisions on most projects.

• Onboarding new people takes longer and feels less consistent than it used to.

• Client issues surface late, often only when the client complains.

• Your best people are working long hours and have stopped proposing improvements.

• One-on-ones are getting cancelled or skipped because there is no time.

If several of these sound familiar, you are not just growing. You are straining. The best time to hire was probably a quarter ago, which means the next best time is now.

What This Approach Will Not Do

Hiring managers early will not make growth painless. Some hires will not work out. Some promotions will turn out to be the wrong fit. There will still be stretches where everyone is busier than they would like. What it does is change the default. Instead of reacting to strain after it has already hurt clients and burned out your best people, you are building the support structure while there is still time to do it well.

Leadership Is the Product

In professional services, the quality of your leadership is ultimately the quality of your product. Clients may hire you for technical skill, but they stay because of how the work is managed: the clarity, the reliability and the way problems are handled. Managers are the people who deliver that experience at scale.

Scaling tenfold taught me that growth is not only about winning more work. It is about building the capacity to deliver that work well, again and again, as the company gets bigger. Hiring managers before you need them is one of the highest leverage decisions a growing firm can make. It feels expensive in the moment. In hindsight, it is almost always the reason growth held together.

I took a firm from $6M to $60M in under three years.

If you lead a growing services team, try one thing this week: look at your hiring plan for the next two quarters and ask who will manage those new people. If the honest answer is "the same managers we have now, just busier," you have found the conversation worth having before the new hires arrive, not after.