I almost hired 3 people I didn't need

In 2023 and 2024, my agency was drowning in quotes. We couldn't keep up. Leads were piling up, and my immediate thought was: I need more sales reps. I need more VAs on the back end. 

Sound familiar? 

Here's what I didn't see at the time: I had a closing ratio problem, not a capacity problem. I was quoting everyone who called, writing a lot of monoline business, and burning out my team on work that wasn't converting. 

So, in 2025, we stopped. We completely reworked our sales intake process. We doubled down on prequalification before we even touched a quote. We qualified for bundling upfront. We got ruthless about who deserved our time. 

The result? We got about half the leads compared to the year before. But we wrote similar premium with better close rates and more policies per customer. 

I didn't need more people. I needed better processes. 

Why does this keep happening? 

Clayton Christensen's RPP Framework explains it perfectly. Every business has three parts: 

1. Resources - People, money, technology (the "what") 

2. Processes - How those resources work together (the "how") 

3. Priorities - Values that guide decisions (the "why") 

Here's the trap: Resources are easy to add. You can hire someone tomorrow. You can buy more leads next week. Resources scale linearly. 

But if you add resources to broken processes, you just scale the problem. Now you have two people stuck in email chaos instead of one. You're spending twice as much on leads that still don't close. 

Processes are harder to fix. They require rethinking workflows, challenging the way your team operates, and pushing through resistance to change. (And trust me, staff will resist. Mine did.) 

But processes are where leverage lives. Fix the process, and suddenly the same resources produce dramatically different results. 

The question you need to ask: 

Before you post that job listing or increase your ad spend, ask yourself: "If I had twice the staff or budget tomorrow, would my current processes actually produce better results, or would I just have more people operating inefficiently?" 

Most of the time, it's not a people problem. It's not a money problem. 

It's an efficiency problem. 

And efficiency problems require process solutions, not resource solutions.