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Founder memo / 001 Hiring before headcount
Before you hire another person, prove you need the seat.
Things break as you scale. But not every breaking point is a hiring problem. Pressure-test the role before you commit months, payroll and founder energy to the wrong answer.
Free · 4 questions · No email wall
Live founder question
“Should I hire for this — or am I trying to hire around the real problem?”
Start with the job title Copy a role from another brand Start with what keeps breaking
The wrong seat does not remove the bottleneck. It gives it a salary.
01 / THE REAL QUESTION
The scaling trap
Hiring gets blamed for problems that headcount cannot fix.
You cannot bring someone in and expect them to operate exactly like you. Nor should you.
The harder question is whether the business needs a new capability, a clearer owner, a better system — or simply a founder willing to let go.
A growth goal has no single accountable owner
The team is busy, but the constraint keeps surviving
02 / FREE DIAGNOSTIC
Pressure-test the hire before the search.
Four questions. An honest read on whether to hire, reshape the role or pause.
The trigger
What is making this hire feel urgent?
Separate a recurring business constraint from a loud week.
03 / THE METHOD
Find the constraint. Then find the person.
A decade obsessed with hiring taught me that the search gets easier when the business problem is brutally clear.
Name what keeps breaking
Look past the title and identify the repeated commercial or operational constraint.
Define what leaves your plate
Make the founder leverage explicit, along with the decisions the new owner can make.
Hire against evidence
Only search once the outcomes, bar and genuine missing capability are clear.
A note from
one founder
to another
one founder
to another
“I want every DTC founder to realise the thing they have spent a lifetime building — and know talent will not be the bottleneck.”
I have spent a decade bringing the right people into the right seats for founder-led brands.
If the test shows you have a solid role, I would welcome a chat. But only after the thinking delivers value.
START WITH THE DECISION