I'll ask you a question I ask myself every year around this time: if you looked honestly at your team right now, would you say every person is sitting in the seat that suits them?
Most business owners can't answer that with confidence. Not because they don't care about their people, but because most hiring, delegating and team-building decisions get made on gut feel: a good CV, a strong interview, a sense that someone "seems right." And then, months later, we wonder why the perfect-looking hire never quite clicked, why two capable people keep grinding against each other, or why a talented team member seems to be slowly running out of steam in a role that looked ideal on paper.
The problem usually isn't the people. It's the mismatch.
Summer is when I do this work in my own business. Things are a little quieter, the diary has some breathing room, and it's the natural moment to take stock before autumn hits and Q4 planning takes over. If you want to go into the final quarter of the year with real clarity about who you need, where your current team is best placed, and what you should be hiring for next, this is the time to build that picture. Here's how.
Start with how people actually work, not how they present
Think about a rugby team. The prop and the winger are both elite athletes who've trained hard and are fully committed to the game. But put the prop on the wing and the whole system falls apart, not because either player lacks ability, but because the role demands something completely different from each of them.
The same thing happens in professional service businesses every day. We hire the person who interviews well and looks strong on paper, then discover months in that the role is fighting their natural wiring. The Kolbe A Index is the tool I use to get ahead of this. It doesn't measure intelligence, personality or values. It measures how someone instinctively takes action, across four areas:
Fact Finder — how much detail someone needs before they'll move. Drip-feed information to a high Fact Finder and you'll lose their confidence; overwhelm a low Fact Finder with detail in week one and you'll lose their attention.
Follow Through — their relationship with systems and completion. If you're a low Follow Through founder (most entrepreneurs are), your ideal support hire isn't necessarily a high Follow Through perfectionist — it's often someone steady in the middle, who can pick up what you start without either burning out on chaos or getting frustrated by your pace.
Quick Start — appetite for risk and ambiguity. High Quick Starts thrive on new ideas and figuring it out as they go. Low Quick Starts, or stabilisers, are your counterbalance — not resistant to change, but the people who stop good ideas turning into expensive mistakes.
Implementer — the instinct to work with physical, tangible things versus ideas and screens. Put a high Implementer behind a desk full-time with no outlet, and you'll watch someone talented slowly grind down.
None of these is better or worse. But knowing where each person on your team sits changes how you brief them, how you support them, and where you place them.
Then ask why they do what they do
Kolbe tells you what someone does naturally. The PRINT Profile tells you why. It maps the unconscious motivators driving that behaviour, and — just as usefully — what your "shadow behaviour" looks like when you're under the wrong kind of pressure or working against your own motivators rather than with them.
This is uncomfortable territory, but valuable. It's usually the explanation for those moments you look back on and think: that's not how I meant to lead that conversation, or why did I react like that? Understanding your own shadow behaviour, and your team's, gives you a way to spot it coming rather than clean up after it.
Used together, Kolbe and PRINT give you a genuinely complete picture: what someone does, why they do it, and the conditions that bring out their best — or their worst.
Focus where the return is highest
One of the top female Ironman athletes in the world, Jackie Herring, was once asked why she trained less on swimming than many amateurs. Her answer was immediate: doubling her swim training might shave two or three minutes off her time. Putting those same hours into her biking and running would make a far bigger difference. The insight wasn't about effort. It was about where effort actually pays off.
Your profile tells you the same thing about your business. There's work you do brilliantly and instinctively, because it aligns with how you're wired — that's where doubling down pays off. There's work you do adequately but at a real cost, because you're fighting your own instincts to get it done. And there's work that will never be your best, no matter how hard you try, because it's a genuine mismatch. Knowing which is which isn't a nice-to-have. It's strategy.
Build it into how you hire
Before you advertise a role, define the ideal Kolbe range for the position itself — not for a person, for the work the role actually demands. A candidate with high Follow Through applying for a role that needs constant pivoting will eventually hit friction. A high Quick Start in a role that demands meticulous, repeatable accuracy is a mismatch that will surface, just not on day one.
Build a simple scorecard before you interview: the core criteria for the role, the ideal profile ranges, and a scoring approach you can apply consistently across candidates and interviewers. It also lets you spot the opposite situation — the brilliant candidate applying for the wrong role, whose profile is quietly pointing them somewhere else in your business entirely. Those are often the strongest hires you'll ever make, if you're paying attention.
Why now
Steve Jobs came back to a struggling Apple and cut a sprawling product line from over sixty items down to four. Not because the rest were bad, but because the business had lost sight of what it was actually brilliant at. The clarity that followed produced the most successful run in the company's history.
That's the exercise worth doing this summer, before Q4 planning locks you into another year of guesswork. Look at your team, and at yourself, and ask honestly: where is the mismatch costing us? What can we eliminate, automate, or hand to someone better wired for it? And what does the ideal profile look like for the role we'll need to fill next?
Take the Kolbe A Index yourself. Read the full report properly. Then start building the team, and the working day, that your profile has been quietly asking for all along — so that when Q4 arrives, you're not reacting. You're ready.
