How to Scale Without Over-Hiring

Summary

Podcast Summary: EntreLeadership — “How to Scale Without Over-Hiring”

Host: Ramsey Network | Episode Date: August 12, 2026
Guests: Dave Ramsey, John Felkins (EntreLeadership Head Coach), Zach Baird (CEO, Low Voltage Company)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the real-world challenge of business scaling and effective hiring. Dave Ramsey, John Felkins, and guest Zach Baird explore how midsize businesses can grow without over-hiring, avoid single-person “critical roles,” and use metrics and strategic planning to create sustainable expansion. The conversation showcases tactical leadership insights for entrepreneurs aiming to break through revenue plateaus without risking financial health or operational bottlenecks.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing the Challenge: Scaling Without Over-Hiring

• Pressure Points: Zach Baird, CEO of a fast-growing low voltage company, faces single-person dependency in key roles, making the business vulnerable if someone leaves or falls ill.
• Zach’s Dilemma: He is hesitant to hire before sufficient revenue is in place, fearing both over-staffing and under-staffing, especially after previous periods of rapid but unsustainable growth.
  • Notable Quote:

    “We have lots of one man departments and it feels kind of like we’re at a point where if you add another full time employee ... you’re going to end up with not enough work for that person ... but if someone leaves we’re going to be in a really difficult place.” — Zach Baird (03:00)

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2. Business Background & Structure

• Origins: Zach’s company, founded in 2016, provides cameras, access control, structured cabling, and jail control systems in Florida.
  • Unique Client Story: Zach recounts meeting a key sheriff’s office IT director at a trade show, an unexpected connection that launched local government contracts (01:36).
  • Memorable Moment:

    “I was at a trade show ... sitting next to a guy selling custom hats ... at the end he’s like, by the way, I’m the director of IT for the local county ... so that kind of launched our way into state and local government.” — Zach Baird (01:36)

• Current State: Company has mid-30s headcount, but many roles (finance, system design, director of ops) are “departments of one” (04:25).

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3. Identifying the Scaling Barrier

• Specialization vs. Flexibility: The company has become highly compartmentalized, which brings expertise but also operational risk.
  • Notable Quote:

    “Our team is really good at what they do...and that’s a strength for us. But also I think it’s become a weakness…there’s not much leeway there.” — Zach Baird (03:36)

• Past Scaling Lessons:
  • In 2020: Revenue was $420k.
  • In 2021: Jumped to $4.2M—an explosive growth that created unseen cracks (06:12).
  • Over-hiring at the peak led to efficiency challenges and subsequent downsizing.
  • John Felkins labels this the “trailblazer stage,” where moving forward requires a strategic plan instead of intuition or reaction to pressure (07:09).

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4. The Power of Strategic Planning

• Data-Driven Hiring: John urges Zach to build a forward-looking, metrics-based strategic plan so hiring is predictable, not reactive (07:09).
  • Notable Quote:

    “The thing that’s keeping you from being able to scale is not just this role or that role, but ... having a strategic plan ... when we get to this number, we need to hire ...” — John Felkins (07:09)

• Revenue Triggers: The critical insight is to define specific revenue or pipeline milestones that trigger hiring for a new role — especially in critical, technical seats.
  • Zach’s Reflection:

    "I need to focus on the metrics ... what revenue or pipeline markers make the most sense to then hire another individual." — Zach Baird (12:24)

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5. Building for Sustainability

• Efficiency vs. Burnout: The team periodically boosts productivity to delay adding headcount, but John cautions this is only a short-term fix (11:17).
• Standardizing Processes: Zach describes efforts to document and standardize procedures to support smoother scaling and onboarding (10:18).
• Sales Pipeline Forecasting: John advises mapping the sales pipeline all the way up to lead generation and close rates, especially since much business comes from unpredictable referrals (13:24, 14:00).
  • Notable Quotes:

    “There’s nothing better than word of mouth, right? But it’s hard to predict.” — John Felkins (13:56)
    “The farther upstream you can get ... the more advanced warning you’ve got on when you’re going to have demand and when you’re going to need to make that hire.” — John Felkins (14:00)

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6. Mindset: From Fear to Confidence

• Past Mistakes Breed Caution: Zach freely admits former missteps in hiring too quickly have made him wary—John encourages shifting from emotional, fear-based hiring to numbers-based action (07:09, 15:06).

  • Notable Moment:

    “Making those decisions out of fear is, you know, not a good place to be.” — John Felkins (15:06)

• Unlocking Time for Vision: John reminds Zach that creating margin to focus on vision and strategy (not filling roles reactively) is transformative for the company and its leader (15:06).

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7. Closing Thoughts & Takeaways

• Main Action for Zach: Review metrics, establish clear hiring thresholds tied to revenue and pipeline data, and fill critical seats in response to data not stress.
  • Memorable Moment:

    “I just need to go sit down and put [the numbers] next to each other.” — Zach Baird (15:31)

• Dave’s Wrap-Up:
  > “Hiring gets a whole lot easier when it’s driven by a strategic plan instead of pressure…what I love about this conversation is Zach already knew the answer…he just needed someone to ask the right questions.” — Dave Ramsey (15:45)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:05]–[03:00]: Setting up the scaling/hiring problem, Zach’s business background
• [03:00]–[05:14]: One-person departments, impacts on operations, team structure
• [05:14]–[07:09]: Growth goals, past over-hiring, revenue leap, learning from mistakes
• [07:09]–[08:36]: Strategic planning as a map for growth, pipeline dependencies
• [09:52]–[11:17]: Tactical discussion: sales team, roles to hire, using EOS, process standardization
• [12:24]–[13:03]: Identifying metrics and revenue markers for confident hiring
• [13:56]–[15:06]: Predicting demand with referrals, moving “upstream” for hiring signals, shifting from fear to confidence
• [15:45]: Dave Ramsey’s closing advice: the value of coaching and data-driven planning

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Notable Quotes

• Zach Baird:

  • “We have lots of one man departments and it feels kind of like we’re at a point where if you add another full time employee ... you’re going to end up with not enough work for that person ... but if someone leaves we’re going to be in a really difficult place.” (03:00)
  • “Our team is really good at what they do...and that’s a strength for us. But also I think it’s become a weakness…” (03:36)
  • “I need to focus on the metrics ... what revenue or pipeline markers make the most sense to then hire another individual." (12:24)
  • “I just need to go sit down and put [the numbers] next to each other.” (15:31)

• John Felkins:

  • “The thing that’s keeping you from being able to scale is ... having a strategic plan.” (07:09)
  • “There’s nothing better than word of mouth, right? But it’s hard to predict.” (13:56)
  • “Making those decisions out of fear is...not a good place to be.” (15:06)

• Dave Ramsey:

  • “Hiring gets a whole lot easier when it’s driven by a strategic plan instead of pressure…” (15:45)

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Episode Takeaways

• Avoid dependency on single-role “departments of one”
• Use clear revenue, pipeline, and close-rate metrics to trigger new hires
• Standardize core processes for scalability and easier onboarding
• Plan hiring in advance, not as a reaction
• Move past fear-based decisions; trust data, vision, and solid planning
• Coaching can offer the perspective and accountability to turn these insights into action

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This episode is essential listening for leaders who want to scale confidently—without risking overstaffing or burnout—by relying on process, planning, and the right metrics rather than gut feel.

Transcript

[Dave Ramsey]

If you're trying to scale your business, but you're not sure when it's time to grow your team, this conversation is for you. Zack Baird has built a strong company with over 30 team members. But too many key pieces of his business rely on a single person. If someone leaves, gets sick, or takes time off, the whole team feels it. He knows he needs to get more help, but he's afraid of hiring before he has the revenue to sustain it. On this episode, head coach John Felkins sits down with Zach to help him determine when to make his next hire and address the missing piece that's making this decision feel risky in the first place. Let's listen in.

[John Felkins]

Well, Zach, thanks for coming and hanging out with us today.

[Zach Baird]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[John Felkins]

Tell me a little bit about your business.

[Zach Baird]

Yeah. So I started the company in 2016, living in Gainesville, Florida. I was working couple full time jobs at the time and also started. The company grew slowly up until Covid and actually Covid's when we grew really quickly. Okay, what do y' all do? Yeah, so we're a low voltage company. So we do cameras, access control, structured cabling, jail control systems in the state of Florida.

[John Felkins]

Did you say jail control systems?

[Zach Baird]

Yeah, yeah. So it's called PLC's Programmable Logic Controllers. Basically, if you've ever been to a jail, hopefully I have the right side of it.

[John Felkins]

Just for the record, I've never been to a jail.

[Zach Baird]

I've been to a few. Yeah, but you walked. Walk in. And they have a security operations area, and people there are able to unlock all the doors and control the facility from there. So we installed new systems.

[John Felkins]

Okay.

[Zach Baird]

It was actually really funny. I was at a trade show many years ago and sitting next to a guy who was selling custom hats. And for two days I got to know this guy. He has all this business, all these guys. The sheriffs are coming and talking to him and buying his hats. And no one's coming to my booth. Cause he wants to talk about cameras. And at the end he's like, by the way, I'm the director of IT for the local county here, the sheriff's office. We should have a conversation. I was like, oh, that's cool. So that kind of launched our way into state and local government work.

[John Felkins]

Isn't that crazy how those kind of things happen?

[Zach Baird]

It is, yeah.

[John Felkins]

So what's going on in the business right now? What challenge are you working on?

[Zach Baird]

Yeah, so we're kind of like ramping back up. We had like a little lull about two years ago and some Staff changes and my team's incredible. Like we have a really great team, but I've started to notice that, you know, we have lots of one man departments and it feels kind of like we're at a point where if you add a human, another full time employee onto the docket that you're going to end up with not enough work for that person. Right. Okay. It also is concerning that if somebody were to have to leave or something happened to them or sickness or whatever, that we're going to be in a really difficult place. Right. Like we have one person in what we call a system design role and they basically take all the information from the salesperson, build the quotes and push it out. And it feels like if something were to happen to him, if he were to get sick or took another job, whatever, it's like now I've got this whole role missing and it's not an easy job to hire for. So it's really just a point of concern for me. Right. And like him and there's several other seats in the company. If somebody were to leave, it's like, what are we going to do? You know, so that's, that's been something that has been difficult because we're not really in a place to just go and hire one more of all these people. And there's not a lot of crossing between the roles.

[John Felkins]

So everybody's doing something completely different. They don't cross train at all or talk to each other about how they do what they do.

[Zach Baird]

I mean, so there's myself and my director of operations. The two of us can pretty much do most of the seats, like most of the things of the company, right. Where we know our product stacked, we understand how to program it, we can design quotes, we can do sales. But of course, if somebody leaves us working 40 hours a week, we're already working 50, sometimes 60. So taking that on would be a surmountable task. But yeah, no, we've actually really compartmentalized and maybe for better or worse, I mean our team is really, they're really good at what they do, right. They've gotten to be some of the best at what they do. And that's, that's a strength for us because they're very knowledgeable. But also I think it's become a weakness because now these people do this, These people do this. You know, it's like there's not much, not much leeway there.

[John Felkins]

Tell me again, how many folks do you have on the team total?

[Zach Baird]

Yeah, so we're mid-30s.

[John Felkins]

Mid-30s, yeah. And you got mid-30s. And everybody does something different.

[Zach Baird]

Well, except for the technicians. I mean, we have. Yeah. So we have, we have a PM and then my director of office does pm. We're probably going to be hiring another one of those soon. That's, that's one seat where we do have enough, you know, to kind of fill in another full timer. Okay. But I have, you know, we have finance department, that's a department of one. I've got my system design role. It's the department of one. And my director of ops, it's kind of a department of one. Right. Like, if he's not there, I'm, I'm actually, I'm doing two jobs now. If I'm not there, he kind of does my job at the same time. And actually we were not smart enough and didn't line our schedules. We're both out of office for three days this week. So that's gonna be interesting. We'll see how it goes.

[John Felkins]

Hopefully that's an anomaly. That's not every week.

[Zach Baird]

That's very rare.

[John Felkins]

Yeah. Yeah. So I get that and the fact that everybody's specialized. That makes sense. But I'm curious, what's your plan or even do you want to grow the business? Like, do you want to scale to make it bigger?

[Zach Baird]

Right. And that's. We do. And that's actually the interesting part. Like, we've come up multiple times into the. Getting close to $10 million in revenue. Right. Okay. And we, we went up, ramped up, and then we ended up having to ramp back down. We made some mistakes along the way, and that's normal. I found, I found that it's been very difficult to like break that.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah.

[Zach Baird]

Cusp. Right. Like when you start getting to the point where adding all these additional people and it's definitely a process driven thing that we've been addressing, trying to fix our processes and make them even better than they are. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, the growth is, is the, is the goal. I mean, we had our first ramp up in 2024 or 2023. It was pretty substantial. I mean, like, for example, 2020, we did $420,000 in revenue. In 2021, we did 4.2 million.

[John Felkins]

Okay.

[Zach Baird]

So we had like pretty crazy growth and then we had more sustainable growth years after. But it created a lot of cracks that we. I didn't see until later.

[John Felkins]

Right.

[Zach Baird]

And so now we're trying to rebuild it the right way, being much more conservative with hiring. I mean, at that point, you know, at the peak, we had like three PMs and three system designers and all this stuff, but we were definitely overstaffed.

[John Felkins]

Yeah.

[Zach Baird]

And so now we're. We're trying to be more methodical about it and not just like, oh, we need. We feel pressure, like, add another body, you know, so. Yeah, and that's been. The difficult part is, like, when do you pull that trigger and when do you. Because we've kind of. We've monetized some of our roles, too. Or through compensation, where basically perform more efficiently and still put out quality work, and then you get compensated for that. So trying to give people ownership to be able to make more money, but then also at the same time, you end up creating this. Okay, well, now this person's working 45 or 50 hours a week and making more money, and it's great for them. But now, how do we now add another person? And kind of.

[John Felkins]

It sounds like you're bumping up against that scaling problem. And we call that stage of business the trailblazer stage of business. And the thing that's keeping you from being able to scale is not just this role or that role, but it is, in fact, having a strategic plan. Having a plan in place far enough in the future that you can look at that and you can say, this is where we're gonna need to grow. This is when we're gonna need to hire. And those signals should come as you compare the plan with what the reality on the ground is. And I understand. Cause what I'm hearing you say is you scaled a little bit before, and then the business dropped off, and. And then you had to pull back. And that's not fun. And that'll make you conservative. Right? That'll make. Right. That'll make you hesitant to make that next hire. And I can appreciate that. But the strategic plan is the thing that is the map to say, hey, when we get to this number, we need to hire, and when we get to this number, we need to hire. And the strategic plan also will help you create the pipeline for the business. Hopefully. I suspect with the business that you're in, you're pretty dependent upon government agencies and their investing. Is that right? If you're in jails or do you have enough private sector?

[Zach Baird]

We do a pretty heavy mix. So we have a lot of state and local government, and then we do a lot of, like, private schools. We do industrial warehousing, manufacturing, multifamily.

[John Felkins]

Okay.

[Zach Baird]

It's about half and half.

[John Felkins]

Okay, we'll get right back to our episode. But first, a lot of business owners I talk to Have a vision. What they don't have is capacity. You're spending your days buried in hundreds of administrative tasks like email and scheduling and travel arrangements. Those don't require your leadership. You should be spending your time on things only you can do. That's why I recommend Belay. I've gotten to know the Belay team over the years, and they understand leadership growth and what it takes to help business owners achieve more. Belay helps overloaded leaders carve out capacity by providing executive assistants who help them delegate detail work. These assistants are highly vetted and based in the US So business owners can spend more time on strategy and leading their teams. When you're not tied up with a bunch of little tasks, what could you do? If you've never thought about it, check out Belay's free resource called 15 big moves you could make this quarter if you had the capacity. You can download it for free by texting. Entre to 55123. That's entre to 55123. Now let's get back to the episode. So let me ask you, do you, like, explain your strategic plan for the next 18 months for the business?

[Zach Baird]

Sure. So I have a sales team of three right now. I manage and I'm trying to not manage that. So one of the goals is to get a what I call bag carrying salesman. Right. Somebody who carries a quota, but not the same as a regular salesperson, but also is managing the sales team so that I can kind of pass that off a little bit and focus on more of the vision and like actually planning strategic.

[John Felkins]

Okay.

[Zach Baird]

A little bit of information about our company. We also run on EOs. I'm sure you've heard of EOs.

[John Felkins]

Yes, yes. They're our competitor.

[Zach Baird]

So, I mean, you know, I found out about you guys about a year and a half ago. So that's okay for like three or four years. But yeah, so we run on us right now and it was really helpful in that restructuring. We had our decline back up. So we do have a strategic plan. We built through that and we just rebuilt it. So what does that look like for us is we're very heavy right now on building processes internally so that we, when somebody asks, how do we do blank, we can go, we do it like this. You know, here's our knowledge base on how to do that and trying to standardize things. So. So our biggest things right now is we need to hire. We feel we need to hire a sales manager and we need to hire another project manager. Okay. We, we are feeling the Pressure of a system designer. What's interesting is that as every four to six months we get more efficient with quoting.

[John Felkins]

Right.

[Zach Baird]

So it feels like every time we get close to feeling like we need to hire another person in that role, we find a way to get a little more efficient in our quoting process and our design process. And it's like pressure relieved. But I feel it coming to a point.

[John Felkins]

Yeah, that's, that's a short term solution, right?

[Zach Baird]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Felkins]

Because at some point you've only got 24 hours in the day. You can't.

[Zach Baird]

Right, right.

[John Felkins]

You can only get so efficient.

[Zach Baird]

Right. And then the question. And that, that role is so productive compared to all the other roles in our company that it's like how you add another body on and it's like, okay, now all of a sudden you have, you know, two employees that only need to work 25 to 30 hours a week with their jobs. So what do we do for the rest of the time? Yeah, that's, that's, that has been the hardest role to hire for. I think it's, it's very technical. And it's also, you know, when you add somebody on, it's, it's really a numbers game. You have to either go out and add a couple more salespeople and get them trained up quick so you can bring in that revenue, or that, those opportunities. I don't know. That's, it's just, it's like that's a trick designer. You gotta also go hire a bunch of salespeople at the same time.

[John Felkins]

Yeah. Well, if you could, if you could distill that all down into like one thing that you, you want to solve for, what would you say that one thing is?

[Zach Baird]

I need to focus on the metrics of my, like when to hire and what revenue markers or pipeline markers make the most sense to then hire another individual. So I can go back and look at my pipeline and what my sales team pushes out.

[John Felkins]

Right.

[Zach Baird]

And the pipe that they're creating, say, okay, my system designer, he can handle this much revenue growth. So what do I need my sales team to produce to justify that? Second system designer. Yeah, I could probably use that metric to then justify, like I don't need when I hire someone for them to work 40 hours. Exactly. Like, because there's to be a training period too.

[Dave Ramsey]

Right.

[Zach Baird]

But if I can get everybody productive enough and efficient enough when I hire that, you know, maybe, maybe the, maybe I find out that if I hire another sales manager, another salesperson, then I'm at that limit. Right. I'm Right there. Yeah, that makes sense. And I could probably see that in the numbers. Yeah, I need to go find that. I need to go put the numbers in front of me and look at that.

[John Felkins]

Yeah, I think that's right. And I also think go beyond your sales guys, right? Go. Go even further up in the funnel, because how do they get the leads that they work to close?

[Zach Baird]

We work a lot off referrals.

[John Felkins]

Okay. We're.

[Zach Baird]

We're really strong referral company. We have some inbound from our manufacturers.

[John Felkins]

Okay.

[Zach Baird]

We do have some inbound from just some light marketing that we do, but we spend less than 5,000 a year on marketing.

[John Felkins]

Okay.

[Zach Baird]

And most of our clients, we have, like, a small incentive that most. Some of our clients can't even use in, like, state and local, but they refer us their friends well, and that's fantastic.

[John Felkins]

There's nothing better than word of mouth, Right? But it's hard to predict.

[Zach Baird]

Right?

[John Felkins]

And so when you start looking at your metrics and say, well, this is the inflection point. This is when, you know, we need to hire, I would still look at word of mouth and at the referrals that you get and ask yourself, how many referrals are we getting a month? And look at those numbers and then what's our close rate on the referrals that we get? Because you can project into. You can forecast into that. So I'm just saying that because the farther upstream that you can get, right. The more advanced warning you've got on when you're going to have demand and when you're going to need to make that higher.

[Zach Baird]

And one of my new sales guys, he's actually focused heavily on networking, which has worked out really well. So he does BNI and a couple other things, which I was skeptical of when we hired him. He's like, oh, no, it's gonna be great. I'm like, go on. Go to Friday morning meetings. And he has. And it's been actually pretty cool to see all the new opportunities he's brought into the company. So I see that there's a need to diversify and inbound, but that's a great point.

[John Felkins]

I appreciate that. Well, I think you kind of answered it yourself, to be honest with you,

[Zach Baird]

because you walked me there.

[John Felkins]

But you creating the time, creating the margin in your schedule to be able to focus on the vision, you know, and where you want to be 12 months from today, where you want to be 36 months from today, that's going to help you keep from looking at each and every hire like Can I do this one or can I do that one? Because you got stung in the past and making those decisions out of fear is, you know, not a good place to be.

[Zach Baird]

No, it's not. Yeah. So, yeah. That's great, though. I think this is good. We have all the numbers, so I just need to go sit down and put them next to each other. Right.

[John Felkins]

There you go. You got this.

[Zach Baird]

I can do that.

[John Felkins]

Well, thanks for hanging out with us.

[Zach Baird]

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

[John Felkins]

You bet.

[Zach Baird]

It's a pleasure.

[Dave Ramsey]

Hiring gets a whole lot easier when it's driven by a strategic plan. Instead of pressure, it isn't just about setting goals. It's about creating the clear foundation. You need to make confident decisions that before they become emergencies. What I love about this conversation is that Zach already knew the answer to his hiring problem. He just needed someone to ask the right questions and help him connect the dots. That's exactly why working with an entre leadership coach is so valuable. They'll help you identify what's really holding your business back and give you a clear plan to to move forward and lead with confidence. Just click the link in the description to schedule your 30 minute consultation call. That's free today. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like and subscribe for more real world leadership content. I'm your host, Dave Ramsey, and this is Entrez Leadership.