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You’ve heard it on every business podcast going. Hire slow, fire fast. It gets passed around like scripture, usually by someone running a software company in Austin, where you can let a person go before lunch and never see them again.

You don’t live there. Your ex-employee’s brother services your bakkie. Her aunt sits two seats down at the Wednesday networking breakfast in Wilderness. Fire someone badly here and the story outlives the employment — by years.

And there’s the legal bit. “Fast” in South Africa usually just means “procedurally unfair”, and procedurally unfair means a CCMA referral — whether you’ve got an HR department or it’s you and four staff in a workshop behind the N2.

Nobody actually fires fast anyway

Be honest. When last did you fire anyone fast? Most of us do the opposite. We watch someone underperform from March to October, soften the feedback in every catch-up until it disappears completely, then either explode or quietly “restructure”.

The fire-fast crowd never had to share a 40 m² workshop with the person they’re managing out. You do. It’s awkward, so we wait. And waiting is the most expensive option on the table — you pay the salary, you pay in the rest of the team’s patience, and the person usually knows something’s off long before you say it.

So the slogan fails twice. One half lands you in trouble on the rare occasion you follow it. The other half hands you a noble-sounding excuse for the real failure, which is saying nothing for eight months.

Be honest fast instead

Keep “hire slow” if it’s working for you. Swap the second half for this: be honest fast. If the new hire’s invoicing is a mess in week three, say so in week three. Kindly, in private, and written down with a date on it.

The law is more on your side here than most founders realise. The 2025 Code of Good Practice on Dismissal expressly recognises that small employers can’t run formal HR machinery, and it allows simpler, informal correction — provided the person knows what the issue is and gets a real chance to respond. You don’t need a disciplinary chamber. You need a straight conversation and a notebook.

And most problems named in month one fix themselves. The ones that don’t — well, now you’ve got a fair, documented path instead of a grudge and a case number.

If there’s a conversation you’ve been putting off with someone on your team, book it for Monday morning. Ten minutes. Name the one thing. That’s the whole job.

Tell me about the hard staff conversation you finally had — and what changed after. Reply to this one; I read every answer.