Why the Expensive Hire is the Cheap One, and the Smaller Slice is the Bigger Payday💰
Hey Income Flippers,
I sat down with a friend and business partner this week, and somewhere in the middle of the conversation, he said something that stopped me.
We were talking about a role I've been trying to fill.
I'd been circling it for weeks. I had a number in my head for what the seat was worth, and every candidate who felt right was asking for more than that number.
So I did what most operators do. I kept looking. I told myself the right person would come along at the right price.
He listened to it all and then asked me one question.
"What's it costing you to not have that seat filled?"
I didn't have a good answer.
That's when I realized I'd been doing the math on the wrong thing entirely.
🎯 You have to pay for great talent
Here's the truth I keep relearning.
Great talent costs more.
Not a little more. Sometimes 30% more than the person you could settle for. And every instinct in your operator brain screams that the math doesn't work.
But the math is backward.
You're comparing salaries. You should be comparing output.
The right person doesn't produce 30% more than the affordable one.
They produce multiples more.
They solve problems you didn't know you had. They find the leak in the system you've been stepping over for a year.
They raise the whole team's standard just by walking into the room and doing the work at their level.
The wrong hire doesn't just underperform.
They consume you.
You spend your best hours cleaning up behind them, re-explaining things, checking work that shouldn't need checking.
You bought a discount and paid for it with the only thing you can't buy back.
Here's the part nobody says out loud.
The cheap hire isn't cheap.
It's a year of your life and a seat that stayed empty while somebody sat in it.
The expensive hire is the cheap one.
I've made this mistake more than once.
Every time, the savings were an illusion and the cost showed up later, bigger, with interest.
So look at your last three hires and ask yourself honestly:
"Did I hire the best person, or the best person I was willing to pay for?"
Those are different people. And the gap between them is the gap between the business you have and the one you keep saying you're building.
🥧 A smaller slice of a bigger pie
Here's the second lesson, and it's really the same lesson wearing different clothes.
There is enormous power in giving up a piece of your pie to make the whole pie bigger.
Most entrepreneurs guard ownership like it's the last water on the mountain. 100% of everything.
Every dollar, every decision, every ounce of upside. I understand it completely. You built it. You bled for it.
Nobody was there at the beginning but you.
But 100% of a business capped at your personal capacity isn't a win.
It's a ceiling with your name on it.
Here's what changes when you give someone real ownership.
Profit share. Equity. A genuine seat at the table with real upside attached.
They stop asking what you want them to do.
They start asking what the business needs.
That's not a small shift.
That's the difference between renting someone's effort and compounding their ambition.
An employee optimizes for your approval. An owner optimizes for the outcome.
One of those people works while you're watching. The other works when you're not there at all.
I'd rather own 70% of something climbing than 100% of something stuck.
🔑 This is all one idea
Paying for talent and sharing ownership look like two separate decisions. They're not.
They're the same bet: that other people can multiply what you build, and that the cost of bringing them in is smaller than the cost of doing it alone.
Think about the two kinds of people who work with you.
Some people add. They take a task off your plate. Valuable. Necessary. But the business grows by exactly what they contribute and not one inch more.
Some people multiply. They take a function off your plate and then improve it beyond what you would have done.
They build systems you never would have built. They see around corners you didn't know were there. They make everyone around them better by raising the bar for what "good" looks like.
Adders cost less. Multipliers cost more.
And multipliers are the only reason any business outgrows its founder.
Here's the trap almost everyone falls into.
You budget for adders, then wonder why you're still the bottleneck. You pay adder prices, get adder results, and conclude that hiring doesn't work.
It works. You just bought the wrong thing.
📊 The real math
Let me put actual numbers on this, because "invest in people" is the kind of advice that sounds nice and changes nothing.
Say a great operator costs you 30% more than an average one. Call it $30k a year.
Now ask what that seat controls. If that person owns a function that touches revenue, thirty thousand isn't the number that matters.
What matters is what the function produces under a great operator versus an average one. That spread is never 30%. It's multiples.
Same math on ownership. Giving up 10 or 20 points feels enormous when you're staring at the percentage. But you're staring at the wrong side of the equation.
The question isn't what percentage you gave away. It's what the total became after you gave it.
A small percentage of a big pie beats a big percentage of a small pie. Every time. It isn't close.
The mistake is looking at your slice instead of your plate.
💠So here's what I'd ask you
What seat in your business are you underpaying for right now?
Not because you can't afford it. Because you've never run the real math on what staying empty is costing you.
And who around you is already acting like an owner without owning anything?
Because that person will eventually go build their own thing, and you'll wonder why you couldn't keep them. You could have. You just never made them a partner.
The people who build the biggest things aren't the ones who kept the most.
They're the ones who attracted the best and shared enough to keep them climbing.
Pay for the multiplier. Share the pie. Grow the plate.
Always Forward,
Rob
Rob Chevez​
Founder, GRID Capital Partners
P.S. The fastest way to find multipliers is to stand next to them. That's the entire premise of the GRID Investor Network. Agents, investors, lenders, and operators in the same room building real wealth instead of chasing the next commission. Find your local community at gridinvestor.com.
Rob-approved Tools & Resources 🖤
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