Stop Firefighting, Start Leading: How to Manage Your Recruitment Team for Growth

Recognising the Firefighting Pattern

If you’re like many business owners, you might find yourself constantly putting out fires. Every day, a new crisis pops up. Your inbox pings, your team needs answers, and your clients expect you to be on call. In this conversation, Katy and Jane share how easy it is to slip into this pattern.

Katy explains how you might start each morning with good intentions, but soon your plans get derailed. You’re caught up dealing with small issues for your clients or sorting out questions from your team. Suddenly, it’s the end of the day and you haven’t made any progress on the projects that really matter.

Jane shares that you can fall into firefighting even when you know it isn’t the best way to run your business. You might feel trapped, always reacting instead of planning ahead. When you’re stuck in the firefighting habit, you simply don’t have the headspace for vision, growth, or strategy. It drains your energy and keeps you on the back foot.

Why You End Up Firefighting

Why do you find yourself in this situation time and time again? Katy and Jane agree there are a few simple reasons. When you start your business, you may feel like you have to handle everything yourself. No-one else knows how things are done. If you don’t reply straight away, you might worry that clients or your team will think you don’t care.

Jane talks about the guilt that creeps in when you don’t respond instantly. You want to be helpful, so it’s tempting to answer every phone call or email as soon as you receive it. Sometimes, you simply fall into the habit because it feels easier to solve problems straight away rather than set up systems to prevent them.

Katy identifies with the drive to feel needed. You may get a buzz from being the person who can step in and fix problems. But this comes at a cost: if you’re always the one jumping in, it’s hard for your business to grow without you. Your team learns to lean on you for every little thing, and you never get a break.

Making Your First Change: Shifting Away from Reactivity

So, how do you start to break this routine? Katy and Jane offer a few practical suggestions.

First, Katy urges you to take a look at your motivation. Are you stepping in every time because your business truly requires it, or have you slipped into “rescuer” mode? Sometimes, you might need to admit you enjoy being needed and that’s okay, but recognise the downside.

Jane suggests focusing on simple systems. If you don’t have processes in place, every small task or client request becomes a mini emergency. Writing down a clear process for how you do things gives you something to refer back to. You don’t have to keep everything in your head, and you can start to hand things over to others.

Both Katy and Jane encourage you to play to your strengths. If there are parts of the business you find overwhelming, maybe invoices or client onboarding. Look at what support you could bring in, even for a few hours a week. You’ll free yourself up and make things smoother for everyone.

Trusting Your Team and Creating Boundaries

Empowering your team makes a huge difference. Katy talks about stepping back from always being the answer-person. Instead of giving your team the solution straight away, she suggests you respond with questions like, “What have you tried?” or “What do you think the answer could be?” This encourages your team to think for themselves, so they get confident solving problems on their own.

Jane points out that your team often already has the answer. They might just want your reassurance. If you let them try things themselves and let them make their own mistakes, they’ll learn far faster. Your business will be less reliant on you for every little decision.

You also need to set boundaries with your clients. Katy admits this can feel awkward, especially if you’ve always been available at all hours or on short notice. But you can explain that working in a more structured way helps you get better results for everyone. Having set “office hours” or promising to reply within a certain window is much clearer for clients, and it allows you to focus deeply on your most important work.

Protecting Your Time and Energy

If you spend your energy on constant emergencies, you’ll have nothing left for real progress. Both Jane and Katy are clear about this point: looking after yourself isn’t selfish. It protects your business.

Jane recommends blocking out time in your calendar for strategy and planning. At the start of the week, set aside slots for important tasks rather than leaving your whole schedule open for surprises. If you don’t defend this time, urgent requests will crowd it out.

Katy shares that she’s learned to be more disciplined with her own diary. She deliberately schedules “deep work” time, when she ignores everything except her highest priorities. Permission to focus is essential. You don’t have to be accessible 24/7 to be good at your job.

You also don’t need a large budget or big team to make these changes. Katy reminds you that small improvements like writing out your key processes or making time for planning can create instant breathing space in your week.

Building for the Future: Make Yourself Less Indispensable

One big lesson Katy and Jane offer is this: your business should work even when you aren’t there. They encourage you to start making yourself “redundant” in everyday operations, even if it feels uncomfortable.

Jane uses the example of writing out important processes in detail, not just for others, but for yourself too. If you have a checklist for how to onboard a client, or a document outlining the steps for sending an invoice, you are ready to train someone else or pick up where you left off after a break. It protects you from being the single source of knowledge or action.

Katy says that these procedures make it easier to hand over tasks, train team members, and, most importantly, take a proper break without guilt. You can leave knowing things will still get done.

Don’t let perfectionism hold you back. Choose one small area where firefighting drains your energy the most. Fix that with a process or some structure. As you see the benefits, you’ll find it easier to build out similar systems elsewhere in your business.

Moving From Firefighting to Leading

The message from Katy and Jane is clear. If you want your business to thrive and you want to enjoy running it, you need to step out of firefighting mode. By setting boundaries, supporting your team to grow, and introducing practical systems, you put yourself back in control.

You don’t have to do everything overnight. Start with one habit or process, then tackle the next. Each small change frees up your time and sanity, and lets you shift your focus from the daily scramble to the big picture.

Remember, you get to set the culture of your business. If you show your clients and team that you value structure and clarity, they will respect your boundaries too. You’ll have more room to think, create, and guide your business where you want it to go.

Take the first step today. Ask yourself: What one thing could you change to stop firefighting all week? Whether it’s writing a checklist, turning off your notifications for a few hours, or asking your team to bring solutions instead of problems, every improvement makes a difference.