What should you do before Hiring or Firing in your business? | Sawan Kumar - Motivational Coach

Before hiring or firing in your business, you need to run a two-week audit of the role itself — not the person — because most founders fire the wrong human and hire to fix the wrong problem. I have watched this pattern destroy more small businesses than any market downturn ever could.

Direct Answer: Before hiring or firing in your business, document every task the role actually performs for two weeks, calculate the revenue or cost the role is directly responsible for, and compare that against the salary plus 1.3x overhead. If the role is unclear, you have a systems problem, not a people problem — and replacing the human will not fix it. Only after this audit is complete should you make the hire-or-fire call.

The Real Reason Founders Mis-Hire and Mis-Fire

Across the 79,000+ students I have trained and the dozens of small business owners I have personally coached in Dubai and India, the same pattern repeats. A founder feels overwhelmed, posts a job, hires someone, and three months later wonders why nothing has changed. Or the reverse — performance drops, they fire the employee, and the same problem returns with the next hire.

The issue is almost never the human. It is that the role was never defined in writing, the success metric was never set, and the founder was using the hire as emotional relief rather than as a system fix. As a Chartered Accountant, I look at every hire as a capital allocation decision. You would not invest 50,000 dirhams into a stock without understanding what return you expect — yet founders hire 8,000 AED/month employees on a gut feeling.

The Two-Week Role Audit (Do This Before Any Hire-or-Fire Decision)

This is the exact framework I run my consulting clients through before they touch a single resume or termination letter.

• Week 1 — Task Mapping: Have the current role-holder (or yourself if vacant) log every task in 30-minute blocks for five working days. Use a simple Google Sheet with columns for task, time spent, and outcome produced.
• Week 2 — Value Mapping: Categorise each task as Revenue-Generating, Cost-Saving, Compliance, or Admin. Anything that is not in the first three categories is a candidate for elimination or automation, not for hiring.
• The 70% Rule: If 70% or more of the role's hours are spent on tasks an AI tool, a GoHighLevel automation, or a Zapier workflow could handle, you do not need to hire — you need to systemise. I have replaced entire admin roles with one GoHighLevel workflow costing 97 dollars a month.
• The Salary Multiplier: True cost of an employee is roughly 1.3x their salary once you include benefits, equipment, training time, and management overhead. Run the maths before the interview, not after.

Before You Fire: The 3 Questions That Save You From a Bad Decision

Firing feels decisive, but it is usually a reaction. Before you let anyone go, sit with these three questions for 48 hours.

• Did they ever have clarity? Pull out the written job description and KPIs you gave them on day one. If they do not exist, the underperformance is your fault, not theirs.
• Have you given direct feedback at least three times? Vague hints in passing do not count. If you have not had three documented, specific conversations about the performance gap, you have not earned the right to fire.
• Is the problem the person, the role, or the system? A great salesperson with no CRM, no leads, and no offer cannot perform. Fix the system before blaming the human.

Before You Hire: The One-Page Role Document

If after the audit you have confirmed the hire is necessary, do not write a generic job description. Write a one-page Role Charter that includes: the single most important outcome this role owns, the three KPIs that prove the outcome was delivered, the tools and budget the role controls, the decisions the role can make without asking you, and the 90-day milestone. I have used this exact document with my coaching clients and it cuts mis-hires by roughly half because it forces founder clarity before the first interview.

Automation First, Hiring Second

This is the most important shift I teach in my AI and automation courses. In 2026, every hiring decision should start with the question — can a system, an AI agent, or a no-code workflow do 60% of this job? If yes, build that first, then hire a human at a higher level to manage the system. A 25,000 AED/month operations manager running a GoHighLevel-powered automation stack will out-produce three 8,000 AED admin hires every single time. The compounding effect over 12 months is what separates lean operators from bloated payrolls.

The Emotional Discipline Side

Hiring and firing are not just business decisions — they are emotional ones, and that is exactly why they go wrong. Founders hire when they are exhausted and fire when they are angry. The discipline I have built over years of running multiple businesses is simple: never make a hiring decision in the same week you feel overwhelmed, and never fire someone in the same week you feel disrespected. Sleep on it, run the audit, look at the numbers. The right decision is almost always different from the emotional one.

Before hiring or firing in your business, run the two-week audit, write the one-page Role Charter, and ask whether automation could do 60% of the job first. Your next step: open a blank Google Sheet today and log the next 10 hours of your own work in 30-minute blocks — you will see your real bottleneck before you spend a single dirham on a job ad or a termination.