You Do Not Need Your Systems Built Before You Hire

The question I get asked most often, in some form or another, is how much needs to be in place before a firm brings on its first additional person. How complete do the systems have to be. How detailed does the documentation need to get. Whether there needs to be a handbook at all.

My answer tends to disappoint people, so let me give you Jackie Ho’s first. Jackie co-founded Ho and Lacy Architecture in San Francisco, a deliberately small bespoke residential practice, and she went from two people to three with us. Asked directly what systems she had in place before that hire, she said: not really any. No well-crafted handbook. No SOPs. Still making it up as she goes. It is working so far.

I want to defend that position, because I think the instinct to build everything first is one of the most reliable ways a small firm stalls out for a year.

Architects are planners. That is the training and it is genuinely the skill, and it is exactly why this particular trap catches this particular profession. The problem is that it is extremely hard to plan for problems you do not yet understand. You can write the onboarding document, and it will be a document about the problems you imagined rather than the ones you get. It is much easier, and much faster, to react to a real problem than to anticipate a hypothetical one.

I think of it the way you think about schematic design. You do not solve the building in your head and then draw the finished thing. You start putting moves on paper, you see what breaks, and you develop it. Bringing on your first person is jumping into SD. You start, it gets messy, you adjust, and in a year you have a system that is actually shaped like your firm instead of shaped like your assumptions.

Compare the two firms I see. One decides to get its documentation in order first. Twelve months later the documentation is still not finished, because writing process documents is not urgent and client work always is, and they have not hired anyone. The other one jumps in. Twelve months later they would not do it the same way a second time, but they have a working system, they are using it, and it is helping them. That firm is much further ahead, and the reason is simply that they have had real problems to respond to.

There is a related pattern worth talking about. Early on, firm owners know exactly which systems they need and they assume they will be the ones to build them. In practice it is usually much later, once the firm has matured and grown, that those systems get built properly, and often by someone else entirely or alongside someone else. Every person you add frees up enough of your head to go back and do that work. Waiting until you have the bandwidth to build systems before you hire the person who creates that bandwidth is a loop with no exit.

So if the answer is not a handbook, what did Jackie actually have.

Three things, and none of them took long.

She had her time tracking already running. Ho and Lacy have used Monograph for years, so on day one the new person could be plugged straight into the existing metrics. As long as she tracks her time properly, Jackie can quantify the work. That matters more than it sounds. Most of the anxiety about a new hire, particularly a remote one, is really anxiety about not being able to see what is happening. Time tracking that was already a habit for the firm solved that on the quantitative side immediately.

She pulled two or three drawing sets out early and handed them over as reference. These are the ones we want you to understand and absorb and ask questions about, these are our gold standard, let us do equivalent or better going forward. Same for presentations. That is not a system, it is a set of examples, and for a firm doing high-design residential work it communicates more about the standard than twenty pages of written process ever would.

And she had the basics of graphic identity. Logos, templates, formats, fonts, graphic standards. Small stuff, already existing, no additional work required.

The fourth thing is not a system so much as a rhythm, and it is the piece I would encourage you to copy directly. They hold a fifteen minute check-in every morning. It is on all three calendars, it is at the start of the day, and they do not always all make it but they make it most of the week. The stated purpose is narrow and I love it for that: make sure she has what she needs from us to do what she needs to do today. Questions get asked there. Nothing sits blocked for a day and a half. They are on chat all day besides, and the time zone offset is only two hours, so the working days genuinely overlap.

That is it. Time tracking, a few reference sets, templates, and a standing fifteen minutes. The handbook can be written later, out of what actually happened, which is the only way it will be any good anyway.

One last thing Jackie said about it that I think is the honest version of all this. Much of what a new person needs to know is not documentable in the first place. The more time she spends with you, the more she understands how you like things. That is already proving true in their case, and no manual would have accelerated it.

The best system is the rough one you actually use every day. Five polished systems nobody opens are worth nothing.

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