There's a moment every founder hits where the work outgrows the hours. The default move is to hire, get another pair of hands, spread the load. It's reasonable, and it's often the wrong first step.
A hire doesn't remove the chaos. It inherits it. If the process only exists in your head, onboarding is you, repeating yourself. If the tools don't talk, the new person becomes the integration, copying data between them by hand. You've added cost and coordination, not leverage.
A system works the other way. Build the process once, properly, and it runs the same at midnight as it does at midday, without a salary, sick days, or a ramp. The manual work simply stops being manual.
The best time to hire is after the system is in place, so the person you bring on is doing high-value work on top of a machine that already runs, not holding the machine together by hand.