2.129 The Founder’s Dilemma: Managing People vs. Growing the Business

As a founder, do you ever feel stuck firefighting staff issues instead of focusing on growth? You’re not alone.  

One of the most common challenges for business owners is balancing the day-to-day of managing people with the long-term goal of scaling sustainably. 

In this episode, Karen Kirton explores why so many founders get pulled into reactive people management — from hiring mistakes to underperformance and workplace conflicts — and what it really costs your time, energy, and business growth. 

You’ll hear: 

• Why recruitment, poor hires, and unclear processes drain more than just your hours 
• The hidden emotional toll of people management on founders and leaders 
• Why avoiding policies can create more complexity (and how smart policies protect culture) 
• The turning point when founders shift from doing to leading 
• Three practical steps to break the cycle: simplify, delegate, and refocus 
• How our Find, Grow, Keep methodology transforms teams and frees founders to focus on growth 

 Ready to scale with confidence? Book a free discovery call here: https://meetings.hubspot.com/ronita-fourie 

Make sure to subscribe to stay updated with new releases on Mondays!
 
Visit amplifyhr.com.au for more insights and resources.  

Also Mentioned in This Episode: 

https://www.amplifyhr.com.au/managing-performance/ 

https://www.amplifyhr.com.au/why-smart-hr-policies-actually-reduce-complexity-in-growing-businesses/ 

Get our free eBook packed with practical strategies to attract, engage, and retain top talent. Perfect for business owners and leaders focused on building a thriving team. Download it at amplifyhr.com.au/downloadable/find-grow-keep

Transcript

welcome to Episode 129, which I'm calling the Founders dilemma, which is how do you manage people while growing your business? 
Because if you have ever felt like you are firefighting staff issues and just not getting the time to focus on growth, then that's what this episode is about. Because this tension is really common for founders and senior leaders. You know, we get stuck in the hiring and sorting out. 
Small and sometimes big conflicts. While daily people management is really just taking all of our time and so that more future thinking, strategic work then goes on the back burner and an example of this I read about recently was with Melbourne born Fintech Airwallex, which is. 
By founder Jack Zhang and he said in this article that in the early days he personally hired around 100 staff via LinkedIn and interestingly, he said that this was a huge strategic misstep. 
It slowed recruitment, it ate into his time and it made it harder for him to focus on scaling the business intentionally, and he also admitted that neglecting company culture and just hiring too many traditional banking professionals created misalignment with those startup values. 
And this sounded so familiar to me from the many founders that I've met over the years, who is still acting as a recruiter, an onboarding manager, a culture centre, a strategist, and it just means that you're spread really thin. 
And therefore, so is your business growth and the turning point usually comes when founders move from doing to leading and we could only do that by building systems, delegating people functions and getting that time back to intentionally focus. 
On business strategy and growth. 
So why do we get pulled into these weeds? And one of the biggest reasons we stay stuck is because staff management is reactive by nature. You know, an issue rises up and we deal with it. Another one comes along, we're back in firefighting mode. 
And it can feel never ending, and those issues can be, you know, underperformance, it could be team members not getting along, it could be confusion over policies or that constant cycle of hiring and onboarding. Now if we just take underperformance, you know this research that shows that some managers can spend up to a day a week dealing with poor performance, so a full 20% of your working time gone before you've ever looked at anything strategic about building the business. And it's not just your time, it's also that emotional energy, which is huge. 
And as I've shared before in earlier episodes, you know, formal performance management processes can be exhausting and can sometimes even backfire when we leave the employee resentful and the wider team are also damaged. 
And you know the root cause is often something quite simple, unclear expectations, miscommunication, hidden roadblocks, and whether it's someone not fully understanding those timelines or what they need to do, whether they think their way is better. 
Or they feel like they're being rewarded for the wrong behaviours, even unintentionally, you know, without digging into these, we could find ourselves pulled deeper into formal steps which actually could have been really unnecessary. And when things get formal. 
You know, of course it makes just the whole business feel a little bit pulled down because everyone starts to feel that tension and that exhaustion. 
And sometimes those steps just don't work and you know it's really where we start to think, OK, how do we protect the business legally, but also how do we give someone a fair shot at turning things around? How do we keep the rest of our team motivated? How do we keep them confident? 
The performance is taken seriously, so even done well, it can really put a strain on working relationships and definitely if it's done poorly then it's stressful for everyone and can create even more headaches, legal or cultural. 
So on top of this, many founders resist policies because they don't want red tape. They don't want to be too corporate. But the absence of policies can create more complexity, not less. Provided the policies are simple and people-first, they’re designed to reduce decision fatigue. You know, policies shouldn't be about control, they should be about clarity so that managers don't need to make case by case decisions that could be inconsistent and unfair. They help with everyday questions like leave requests, pay reviews or what happens when someone crosses a line. 
And they give everyone confidence that expectations are fair and transparent. So rather than stifling culture, smart policies actually protect it. So leaders aren't dragged into every minor question or grievance. So if you add it all up, the time spent on performance management, the decision. 
Ad hoc decisions that give a lot of distractions and the emotional load of handling conflict without clear frameworks, it's no wonder that founders and senior leaders feel drained. It's not that the work isn't important, that pulls you away from that bigger picture. You know, if we go back to the Airwallex example. 
You know, he said he spent too much time on recruiting and hiring. Should be about bringing in the right people to help your business grow. But for many founders, it ends up being one of the biggest distractions. You know, whether you're staring at 100 CVS for an admin role or you're struggling to even get a handful of applicants for a specialist position. 
Recruitment is exhausting and time consuming, and the real key is clarity. Without it, you could spend hours reviewing CVS and interviewing the wrong people, and if you get the higher wrong, the costs are even higher in terms of lost time, lost money and the impact on team culture. 
So every hour you spend reading CVS, drafting ads or redoing interviews is an hour not spent on your business strategy and founders often underestimate just how much mental energy goes into these processes and how much it takes away from forward momentum. 
So when the processes go wrong, it doesn't just slow hiring. It ripples into culture, performance and retention because we know poor hires mean more conflict, more performance management, more distraction. And we're getting that cycle where we're constantly reacting instead of leading. So hiring mistakes and unclear processes don't just cost us time. 
They slow our ability to scale, but if we have the right people in place, we can step back into that strategic role that our business needs us to play. So if you're not really focusing on growth and you're bogged down in admin and firefighting and endless people decisions, then maybe this is your turning point. 
Because the turning point is when you treat people and culture or HR as a strategic function and not just an operational one, whether that's through delegating to your team, hiring an HR professional, or using HR partners, you know this frees you up to focus on growth. 
Because if you don't do it, there is also a hidden cost, and that cost is, you know, founders often end up carrying the emotional weight of every staff problem. That means sleepless nights, constant worry, the feeling that you're working even harder but you're not moving the business forward. 
And that can get us create this cycle where we get more people issues, so more time at Edge is spent in the weeds, less time for strategy means slower business growth and of course slower growth means more pressure on the founder to push harder. 
More pressure means more stress, frustration and potentially burnout, and it is a vicious cycle. And unfortunately the team will feel it too, when found as a drain, distracted or constantly firefighting employees miss out on clarity, vision and leadership that they need. 
So you know, it doesn't just show up in exhaustion of the founders. That can also mean poor decision making, strained relationships, loss of creativity. You know, I see founders who have started energised and innovative only to find themselves worn down, avoiding tough conversations, making short term decisions. 
Wondering whether they can really continue the business and if you find yourself thinking things like it's easier if I just do it myself or I don't have time to deal with that right now or I'll get back to that strategy when things settle down, then chances are you're edging into this cycle because the truth is, things rarely settle. 
Down on their own without systems and support, the people side of the business will always fill the space that you leave for it. So how do we break it out of the cycle? It comes from that shift from doing to leading, so founders who scale successfully don't spend their days fixing performance issues, rewriting policies or. 
Sifting through CVS, they build systems and support structures that do these things, and there's three things that can make a difference. Firstly, simplify, put the right frameworks in place so you're not reinventing the wheel every time. 
As I mentioned earlier, smart lean policies will reduce complexity in your business. They give your managers and your employees clarity and they stop issues from escalating so that you can be freed up to focus on the bigger picture. The 2nd is delegate and this is where many founders get stuck feeling like no one else can do the job as well. 
As well as they do. But the reality is that you don't need to do it all yourself, and that might mean promoting from within. It might mean hiring externally. It could mean using a fractional HR partner that gives you the expertise and the support you need without that cost of a full time role. 
And 3rd refocus. So once those systems and support structures are in place, it's about being intentional with your time. That means carving out space for growth, strategy, innovation, partnerships, customer experience, the things that only you as the founder can do. 
And you know, this is where you can bring in a framework and an amplify HR. We use our find, grow, keep model and it's a simple way to think about the people side of your business. We find the right people through clear intentional recruitment. We grow them into high performing teams with structure and development. 
And we keep them engaged with loyal and contributing to long term success. And when you have these three elements working together, the day-to-day people issues don't disappear, but they stop consuming all of your time and energy because you have the systems and the support in place which helps keep you focused. 
And being able to lead the business forward, yeah, as an example, we worked with a tech company with around 40 people and they were really stuck and they really had to innovate. But their culture wasn't ready for it. So when we stepped in and did their employee survey, only two out of the 10 cultural dimensions in that survey scored. 
Above the benchmark, 2 years later, after using our Find Grow Keep methodology, they had tackled those root issues systematically. So in Find, you know, we created clarity around hiring, onboarding, performance expectations. Grow, introducing development programmes, performance discussions, new communication channels. 
And Keep strengthening leadership, compliance and culture through ongoing engagement and collaboration initiatives. And what changed? Well, those culture stores that went from 2 out of 10 above the benchmark went across to 10 out of 10 above the benchmark and they stayed high even 5 years later. turnover drops grievances reduce hiring, quality improves, and the founder and the leadership team were able to reclaim some time to focus on strategy and growth and leading change. So hopefully this example shows that even in small teams for limited resources, we can create a lasting culture shift when clarity, processes and intent come together. So where does this leave you? As a founder, you know if you've been nodding along while I'm talking, and chances are you're spending too much time in the way to people management and not enough on moving your business. 
Forward, but the good news is that you can change that balance. So here are a few simple questions to reflect on this week. One how much of your time is spent on staff management versus strategy? And be honest, you may even need to track it for a fortnight and see what the split really is. 
Two, do you have clear frameworks and policies in place or are you reinventing decisions every time? Three are you holding onto HR tasks that someone else could own? So think recruitment performance, conversations, onboarding. 
For what's 1 area that you could delegate or systemize right now? That would free up your headspace for strategy. 
Because moving from doing to leading doesn't mean that you stop caring about your people. It means that you put the right systems and support in place that your people can thrive and you can focus on business growth. And if this resonates with you, we can help and amplify HR. We have fractional HR which is an HR. 
Partner for as little as one day a month. So you don't carry it all yourself. We also have our accelerate programme, which uses our Find Grow Keep methodology to build the people and culture foundations. You need to scale. You know the Founders dilemma is real, but it doesn't have to hold you back. The turning point comes when you stop firefighting and you. 
Start leading with the right systems, delegations and support. You'll not only have more time and energy, but your business will grow stronger, faster and more sustainably. If you've received value from this episode, I'd love it if you could leave a rating or review over Apple Podcasts or Spotify so someone else can also find. 
On the episodes to help with their business episodes released on Mondays. So click subscribe and you'll be notified of when it's available. Thank you so much for joining me if you have any feedback, questions or ideas for future episodes, head on over to amplifyhr.com.au or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can start a conversation.