Hire Early. Hire Late. Both Can Kill You. One of the most common questions I get
By Simon Ellicott · June 4, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Hire Early. Hire Late. Both Can Kill You.
One of the most common questions I get from Amazon agency owners is:
"When should we hire?"
The uncomfortable answer?
Most agencies are asking the question too late, not because they don't understand recruitment, because they don't understand capacity.
Some agencies hire ahead of demand and accept a temporary hit to profit.
Why?
Because they believe:
Team morale matters.
Burnout destroys retention.
Great people leave when they're constantly overloaded.
Clients feel the impact long before the P&L does.
Others wait until they're drowning.
Every account manager is at 110%.
Every advertiser is firefighting.
Every client request feels like an inconvenience.
The P&L looks healthier.
The founders sleep less.
Neither approach is inherently wrong.
The real question is:
Do you actually know your capacity?
And by capacity, I don't mean a spreadsheet showing everyone is operating at 82%.
I mean:
Are the opportunities in your pipeline realistically scoped?
Are they aligned to your ICP?
Are your teams delivering what's contracted... or everything the client asks for?
Are your utilisation figures measuring productive work or rewarding over-servicing?
Because capacity problems rarely start with hiring, they usually start much earlier.
A poor-fit client.
A vague proposal.
An ambitious sales target.
A founder desperate to land a logo.
An account team afraid to challenge scope creep.
By the time you're discussing recruitment, the real mistake was often made six months earlier.
The agencies navigating this best are reviewing four things constantly:
New Business
Should we even win this client?
Client Portfolio
Which clients should we fix, grow, or let go?
Capacity
What will demand look like 90 days from now?
Operating Model
Are our processes creating ownership or just tracking activity?
Because hiring isn't a recruitment decision.
It's the outcome of hundreds of commercial decisions made before it, and when capacity breaks...
It's worth asking:
Was it the delivery team?
The sales team?
The founder?
Or was nobody actually managing capacity in the first place?
The most mature agencies I've seen don't hire because they're busy.
They hire because they can see the future, and that's a very different thing.
#AmazonAgency #AgencyGrowth #Leadership
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