“To Employ or Not to Employ?” – The Real Choices for Small Business Owners | Ep. 82

If you’re a business owner debating your next hire, mentorbusiness.com is where we help founders choose the right path without burning cash on the wrong one. This episode breaks down when to employ, when to outsource, when to use freelancers, and where AI actually fits, so you can scale with margins intact, not hope.

Lewis Haydon, a trusted business coach and mentor to growth-focused founders, sits down with Ketan Gajjar (Founder & Director, RPO Arena) to expose the true costs, hidden risks, and smarter alternatives to hiring too early. This is not theory; just straight talk, real numbers, and a practical decision framework you can use today.

They dig into the trade-offs between in-house vs offshore, how to protect quality and control, why most owners misread “cheap talent,” and how to combine people + AI to unlock capacity without bloating payroll.

Takeaways:

• The real loaded cost of a “£30k hire” (and why time to manage is the silent killer)

• A simple ladder: freelancer → part-time outsource → full-time outsource → in-house hire

• What to keep in-house (client-facing, high-context) vs what to offload (simple, admin, repetitive)

• Why consistency beats creativity for content and lead-gen and how outsourcing drives both

• How to maintain quality and control offshore: KPIs, huddles, mirrored processes, management layer

• AI won’t replace your team; it reduces headcount needs and amplifies output when owned by a human

• Protect margins first; your “hire” must either make money or protect the people who do

• Debunking the biggest outsourcing myth: the problem was the script and method, not the people

Chapters:

00:00 – Cold open: why hiring too early slows you down

00:51 – Guest intro: who is Ketan Gajjar (RPO Arena)

03:05 – The real cost of employment & a decision framework

06:26 – Solo to small team: scenarios across growth stages

09:25 – Owner leverage: free your calendar, increase output

12:11 – From “I must do it” to scalable capacity

15:10 – Consistency, capacity, and the 40-hour reality

18:12 – UK rules, margins, and hiring risk

19:56 – Three reasons UK firms outsource now

22:30 – Management matters: KPIs, huddles, accountability

25:34 – The dedicated model vs “just a VA”

26:21 – Why Ketan built a managed outsourcing operation

27:43 – Case study: 12x ROI in four months

30:22 – Flexibility in feast-or-famine markets

33:06 – Where AI helps (and where it doesn’t)

35:31 – Human + AI: real workflows that work

37:57 – Objections to India outsourcing, what’s really broken

40:29 – It wasn’t the people; it was the script

42:34 – Rethinking “sales” and outdated mental models

44:26 – Wrap-up and next steps

Keywords:

small business hiring, outsource vs employ, freelancer's vs employees, virtual teams UK, offshore talent India, RPO Arena, managed outsourcing, cost of hiring UK, AI in operations, content operations, lead generation systems, CRM cleanup, process and KPIs, scaling a service business, founder time leverage.

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