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Indeed. You have to think in terms of "revenue per employee": http://www.thinkinglike.com/Essays/Revenue-Per-Employee.html

Provided your new hires are making sufficiently more than they're costing you, and allowing for a ramp-up period, that should be enough. Perhaps the problem is that the founders have a very unique set of skills that they're selling - which makes for a great business, but is inherently hard to scale without a cloning machine. The business needs to be standardised and process-ifyed a bit in order to make it easier to train new employees, or hand off work from the founders.

"Founder Stakhanovism" is actually somewhat workable. Divide your time in the working day into "key" and "grunt" work, where the "key" work is your unique marketable skills and the grunt work is more routine, then hire someone to follow you around and do the grunt work.



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