Start here
Pick the sentence that sounds most like your week. Each path gives you one assessment to run and one thing to change, rather than a reading list.
I have too much work.
Too much work is not automatically a hiring problem. First find out which work is recurring, which is self-inflicted and which could be handed over tomorrow.
- What Should I Delegate? — Rank your work before you buy capacity.
- What should a founder delegate first? — The principles behind the ranking.
- Founder Bottleneck Assessment — Check whether the constraint is workload or decisions.
- Employee Cost Calculator UK 2026/27 — Only once you know what the role would absorb.
I am considering hiring.
The question is not whether you are busy. It is whether the work is recurring, definable and fundable for at least twelve months.
- First Hire Readiness Assessment — Test the five conditions in four minutes.
- How to know when your small business is ready to hire — What each condition means in practice.
- Employee Cost Calculator UK 2026/27 — Model the true first-year cost.
- Employee vs freelancer — Choose the engagement model.
- First Employee Checklist (UK) — PAYE, pension, insurance, contract, week one.
- Preparing business banking before hiring — Only after the role and the budget exist.
I have already hired.
The first ninety days decide whether the hire creates capacity or creates a second job for you. Definition and rhythm matter more than enthusiasm.
- How to manage people when you have never been a manager — Expectations, one-to-ones, feedback.
- How to delegate without micromanaging — Stop the work bouncing back.
- One-to-One Meeting template — A predictable half hour beats crisis conversations.
- Team Spending Controls Builder — Decide what they can spend before they need to ask.
My team waits for me.
If people are waiting, you have kept the decisions. Moving decisions is a different exercise from moving tasks.
- Founder Bottleneck Assessment — Locate the queues.
- How to stop being the bottleneck in your business — Move decisions, not just work.
- Team Spending Controls Builder — Spending approvals are usually the biggest queue.
- How to create a small-business operations manual — So the answers do not live only with you.
Spending is disorganised.
Disorganised spending is a policy gap wearing a technology costume. Write the rules, then choose the mechanism.
- Team Spending Controls Builder — Roles, thresholds, evidence, leavers.
- How to create a team spending policy — The reasoning behind each rule.
- Employee expense policy template (UK) — A one-page policy you can adapt.
- Employee Card Comparison Tool — Now compare the four mechanisms.
- Partner offers, in full — Only if a product is genuinely the next step.
Important knowledge is in my head.
You do not need a documentation project. You need the ten answers you repeat most often, written once.
- How to create a small-business operations manual — Start with recurring questions.
- Team Access Register template — Knowledge includes who can get into what.
- Founder Bottleneck Assessment — See which knowledge gaps are costing you most.
I cannot take time away.
A holiday is a systems test. Whatever breaks in week one is your list of single points of failure.
- Founder Bottleneck Assessment — Identify what only you can currently do.
- Founder Absence Plan template — Cover decisions, payments, customers, emergencies.
- How to create a small-business operations manual — Documentation is the cover.
- Delegated payment administration — Only when the plan says someone else must pay suppliers.
I want to remain intentionally small.
Staying small is a legitimate strategy. It requires better systems than growing does, because there is less slack.
- How to stop being the bottleneck in your business — Capacity without headcount.
- What Should I Delegate? — Some of it goes to contractors or tools, not employees.
- Employee vs freelancer — Smaller commitments, clearly chosen.
- How to create a small-business operations manual — Small teams live or die on documentation.