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Lean Team or Beefy Team? The Hiring Question Most Founders Get Wrong
By Alexander Booth | Rich & Remote
Here’s a weird thing to hear from a guy who runs a staffing company.
Most founders I talk to don’t need more people. They need the right three.
That sounds like I’m talking myself out of business. I’m not. Some of the best conversations I have at GetCSM end with me telling someone to hold off on a hire, or to make one great hire instead of two average ones. Those clients tend to stick around for years. The ones who hire fast to feel busy usually come back six months later asking how to unwind it.
So let’s talk about it. Lean team versus beefy team. Because almost everyone gets this wrong in one direction or the other, and the cost is a lot bigger than payroll.
The Amazon Hangover
I spent a big chunk of my career in corporate, including Amazon. And at a company that size, there’s a team for everything. A team that owns the dashboard. A team that owns the team that owns the dashboard. You get used to it. It starts to feel normal.
Then you leave, start your own thing, and without realizing it you try to rebuild that org chart. Head of this. Coordinator of that. A manager for two people.
I see it all the time with founders who came from big companies. They’re not hiring for the work in front of them. They’re hiring for the company they think they’re supposed to look like.
That’s the hangover. And it’s expensive.
Why Founders Overstaff
It’s almost never because they’re careless. It’s usually one of these.
They’re hiring to feel safe. A bigger team feels like a stronger business. It isn’t. A bigger team is a bigger monthly number you have to hit before you pay yourself.
They’re hiring ahead of the work. “We’ll need this person when we grow.” Maybe. But until then you’re paying someone to wait, and talented people hate waiting. They get bored, then they leave.
They’re hiring to fix a process problem. This is the big one. If your onboarding is a mess, a second onboarding person just gives you two people working inside a mess. Fix the process first. Then see if you still need the hire.
They’re hiring because everyone else is. Somebody in your mastermind just hired a COO, so now you feel behind. Different business, different stage, different math.
The Other Ditch
Now, I’m not going to pretend lean is always the answer. There’s a ditch on the other side of the road too, and plenty of founders live in it.
“Lean” can become a nice word for cheap. Or for scared. Or for “I don’t trust anyone else to do it right.”
You know you’re in this ditch when you’re the bottleneck on everything. Every decision waits on you. Every client escalation lands on you. You can’t take a week off without things quietly falling apart. Your business is technically profitable but you’re running on fumes, and the growth you want is stuck behind your own calendar.
That’s not lean. That’s understaffed, and it’s a different kind of expensive. It costs you your time, your health, and usually some clients you never even hear about because nobody got back to them fast enough.
I wrote a while back about the quiet cost of building a business alone. This is part of that cost.
Here’s mine. My first company was Huckleberry Consulting, and I still love the consulting work. But after working with me, clients kept asking me to hire Customer Success Managers for them. That turned into GetCSM, and it took off like a rocket ship. For about a year, I ran the whole thing by myself.
During that year I hired a few chiefs of staff. It didn’t stick. Some were splitting their time between me and another client, and they picked the other client. One left for personal reasons. Then I found Ela, and she changed the game.
It didn’t happen overnight, though. I had calls with Ela almost every day for about six months. She had the skills. What I wanted was for her to have my mindset, so the decisions she made without me would be the same ones I’d make. At first that made me the bottleneck on every decision. But because I put that time in, she ended up opening the doors for me to step into what I actually needed to be doing as a founder.
Even then, I fell right into the ditch I’m describing. We had Ela, a full-time recruiter, and a new accounts manager focused on bringing in leads. But I held off on hiring a Customer Success Manager for almost two and a half years. That’s a company built on placing CSMs, with no CSM of its own. Ela and I just split the job between us.
That was our biggest bottleneck. As we grew, clients stopped getting real one-on-one time. Some probably felt like we were playing favorites. Other times an issue bounced between us like a hot potato. And we couldn’t spot churn coming, because nobody was dedicated to watching for it.
When I finally hired a CSM, I was picky about it. We’re a CSM company, so our own CSM has to be excellent. Once I found her, the doors opened up again. I can’t tell you how many times she’s caught an issue before the client even knew there was one, long before it ever turned into a bad experience for them.
It changed every other role too. Ela got promoted to Operations Manager and now focuses on growing the team. Recruiting flows smoothly because there’s someone to hand candidates and new client updates to right away. And I get to focus on supporting our new accounts manager, developing leads and building partnerships with affiliates.
One hire. It protected the client experience, helped us catch churn early, and let everyone else on the team get more done.
So How Do You Actually Know?
The honest answer is that it depends on your company and your industry. A services business and a SaaS company need very different shapes. But there are a few questions I ask every founder before they make a hire.
- Is the work repeatable? If you can’t describe what this person does every week, you’re not ready to hire them.
- Does it touch revenue or retention? Roles that keep customers or bring in new ones pay for themselves. Roles that make the org chart look complete usually don’t.
- Are you the bottleneck? If the answer is yes and the work is something someone else could do 80% as well as you, that’s your hire.
- Could one great person plus the right tools do what you were planning to hire two people for? More often than not, yes.
That last one has changed a lot in the last couple of years.
What Lean Looks Like Now
Lean in 2026 doesn’t look like lean did five years ago.
Between AI tools and access to global talent, one sharp person can cover ground that used to take a small department. At GetCSM we’ve watched client requests shift hard toward Customer Success Managers who are strong with AI and automation. Companies aren’t asking for more CSMs. They’re asking for better ones, people who can run a bigger book of accounts because they’ve built their workflow around the right tools.
That’s the new version of lean. Not fewer people doing more grinding. Fewer, better people with better leverage.
And when you hire from places like Latin America and the Philippines, you’re not just saving on cost. You’re often able to hire a level up. The person you couldn’t afford locally becomes the person you can afford to keep for years. One great hire you can retain beats three average hires you keep replacing, every single time.
This is how my wife Karla and I run multiple businesses without a giant team. Our people are spread across time zones, and each one owns something real. Nobody’s there to fill a box on an org chart.
This Is a Freedom Question, Not Just a Money Question
Here’s why this matters for anyone chasing a rich and remote life.
A bloated team is a cage. You have to keep feeding it. You start taking clients you don’t want because payroll is due. You can’t slow down, take a month somewhere new, or say no to a bad deal, because the overhead won’t let you.
An understaffed team is a cage too. Just a different one. You can technically go anywhere, but you’re answering Slack from the beach and you’re not really there.
The sweet spot is a team that’s small enough that you’re not trapped by the overhead, and strong enough that the business keeps moving when you step away.
That’s the whole game.
So before you post that next job listing, ask yourself one thing.
Am I hiring for the business I have, or the one I’m trying to look like?
If it’s the first one, go hire someone great. If it’s the second, close the tab and fix the process first. Your future self, and your bank account, will thank you.
Alexander Booth is the co-founder of Rich & Remote, owner of GetCSM and Huckleberry Consulting, and a relentless advocate for building businesses that don’t require you to sacrifice your life in the process.
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