UpTrajectory Review

David Peterson's piece opens with a confession that will land hard for anyone who has scaled a service business: he thought he was hiring capacity, but he hired a messenger. The distinction sounds like wordplay until you've lived it. Capacity means another pair of hands that expands what the operation can produce. A messenger means a person who carries information between the people who actually make decisions and the people who do the work — a human router that adds a step instead of removing a bottleneck. The piece, from Entrepreneur, uses this framing to challenge one of the most reflexive moves in small business: when demand spikes, hire someone, anyone, fast.

For a small-business operator, this is not an abstract hiring philosophy. It is a cash-flow and quality-control problem wearing an HR costume. Every hire made in a panic to relieve immediate pressure is a fixed cost that persists after the pressure normalizes. Worse, the wrong hire at the wrong structural point doesn't just fail to help — it actively slows you down. A messenger between you and your crew means every customer request, every schedule change, every quality fix now travels through an extra relay. You've added payroll and added latency simultaneously.

What makes Peterson's framing genuinely useful is that it names a failure mode most operators recognize but rarely articulate. The instinct to hire when business picks up is not wrong — it's just incomplete. The piece forces the harder question: what, exactly, is the constraint? If the founder is the bottleneck because every decision routes through them, hiring a messenger doesn't solve that. It institutionalizes it. The new hire becomes a symptom-management layer rather than a capacity expansion, and the founder remains the choke point while now also managing an intermediary.

The under-reported angle here is what this costs beyond salary. A messenger hire trains your team to wait for relayed instructions rather than develop judgment. It trains your customers to expect a slower response chain. And it trains you, the owner, to keep operating as the sole decision-maker because the structure you've built now depends on it. Breaking out of that pattern later means retraining three groups of people, not just one. The compounding damage of a structural mis-hire is far larger than the line item on the P&L suggests.

What to watch for in your own operation: if your newest hire spends most of their day asking you questions and passing answers back to the team, you didn't hire capacity. You hired a messenger. The fix is not necessarily to fire them — it's to redesign the role so decisions live at the level where the work happens. Peterson's piece is worth reading in full for the operational specifics, but the diagnostic test alone is worth the click.

“I thought we were hiring capacity. We hired a messenger.” — Entrepreneur

Takeaway: Before your next hire, name the specific bottleneck — if it's decision flow, fix the structure, don't add a relay.