Pipeline gets messy, reporting falls behind or support begins to slip. The normal response is another role. The book asks leaders to price that decision honestly and inspect the work before approving the box.
The loaded cost
An A$90,000 salary is not an A$90,000 cost. Payroll tax, superannuation, equipment, software, recruiting and onboarding take the direct burden to roughly A$125,000 in the book's example.
Management time, coordination and people overhead push the honest figure closer to A$150,000. A ten-person team on A$90,000 salaries can carry an operating burden closer to A$1.5 million than A$900,000.
The hiring treadmill
A new person can relieve the immediate strain while leaving the workflow unchanged. Growth returns, the drag returns and the business hires again.
The book describes a founder whose forecast called for twelve hires across operations, administration, customer communication and reporting. After mapping the workflows and building systems into them, the business hired four people instead.
At a fully loaded cost of about A$100,000 each, the book calculates roughly A$800,000 a year kept out of the cost base.
Design the work first
Instead of beginning with a Head of Sales box, write down the workflows the function runs: lead capture, qualification, discovery notes, follow-ups, CRM updates, pipeline reporting, contracts and handover.
Then assign one of the book's three workflow modes. Full AI means the agent runs the workflow end to end. Human sherpa means the agent prepares the work and a person approves it. Human executor means judgement, taste, relationships or accountability keep the work with a person.
The shape of the team becomes the result of those decisions. It is no longer the starting point.
Run the test
Take the next twelve months of planned hires. For each role, write the three or four workflows it exists to run.
Mark each workflow as full AI, human sherpa or human executor. Hire where the work genuinely needs the person. Build where the role is repeated routing, drafting, reconciliation, reporting, scheduling, status updates or first-pass analysis.