When you’re in the thick of things, it’s so challenging to stop and look around, much less build a team. But if you don’t, then you’re gonna sink, and you might not be able to recover! Here’s how to stop, drop and roll before the whole thing burns the fuck down.

Find a second’s worth of bandwidth to assess what you need

Whatever it takes, push the shit off for a bit so that you can get the headspace to look at the projects at a high level.

Check your due dates

What’s the tone from the clients? Panicked? Chill? What’s slipping the most? Squeaky wheel list ASAP.

Assign roles to each need.

Look at the list of things that are slipping and assign roles to each. No names needed at this point—just roles and responsibilities so you can assess what you’re even looking at in terms of team members needed. Think about where things intersect. are there multiple roles that one person can fulfill? That’s the sweet spot.

Assign people to the roles and reach out in multiples per role.

The last thing you want to do when it gets to this point is put all the eggs in one scraggly old basket. Reach out to multiple people per role so that you have fall-backs and more fall-backs. You may hear from many of them, but the more the merrier in this instance for sure.

Say yes!

Say yes, dude! Assess who is the best fit and hire them. W9s, an iMessage, and you’re off!

Get busy.

Get a Google doc going with a tab for each team member and what they are responsible for, and the rest will be history.

Taking the time to realize the ship is about to sink is super hard when you’re busy trying to keep things afloat. It’s also difficult to think about giving away money to someone else when you can almost eek it out yourself. But! It’s also important to give the client quality, and it’s good to ask ourselves if we can do that when we’re running at 115% capacity.

Nah.