The question almost always arrives the same way. The team is stretched, someone is doing three jobs, a good candidate has appeared, and the owner asks their accountant: can we afford this?
The answer that comes back is usually some version of "your P&L can support it." That answer is nearly useless, because it measures the wrong thing. A hire is not a monthly expense you either can or cannot cover. It is a commitment that changes your cash position for the next eighteen months, made at a moment when you have the least information about how the next eighteen months will go.
Start by pricing the hire properly. The salary is somewhere between 70% and 80% of what the person actually costs you.
A $90,000 salary is realistically $115,000–$125,000 of annual cash. If you scoped the decision at $7,500 a month, you were about $2,500 a month light.
The second error is assuming the hire produces from day one. Almost nobody does.
A delivery hire in a services business might be billable at 40% in month one, 70% by month three, full by month five. A salesperson might not close anything for two quarters. You are paying full cost against partial output for the entire ramp, and the gap is funded out of cash you already have.
The cost of a hire is not the annual number. It is the cumulative cash deficit between the first payroll and the month they cover themselves.
That deficit is the number worth knowing. For a $90K delivery hire with a four-month ramp, it is commonly $35,000–$45,000 — considerably more than an owner assumes when they think "we can cover $7,500 a month."
Lay the fully-loaded cost against your existing cash forecast and find the lowest point. Not the average — the trough. If your worst month currently leaves you with six weeks of cover and the hire takes it to two, the answer is no, regardless of what the annual arithmetic says.
Write it down before you make the offer. "This works if we close two of the four deals in the pipeline by March." That sentence turns a hope into a checkable condition, and gives you a date at which you will know whether you were right.
Decide the response now, while you are calm. Slow the next hire, defer a distribution, draw on the line of credit, have a hard conversation in month four. Owners who decide this in advance act quickly. Owners who don't tend to wait, and waiting is the expensive option.
The pattern we see most often is not a business that hired someone unaffordable. It is a business that hired three people over five months, each of which looked affordable in isolation, and never modelled them together. The first hire is a decision. The third is a structure — and it usually arrives at the same time as a slow quarter.
If you are planning more than one hire this year, model the sequence, not the individual.
The hiring impact calculator takes your cash balance, monthly net burn, the salary, and a ramp assumption, and returns the trough and the month it lands in. It takes about three minutes and needs no email address.
If the answer comes back uncomfortably close, that is usually a sign the question isn't really about this hire — it's about whether the business has enough forward visibility to make commitments of this size at all. That's a different conversation, and a more useful one.