The First Ten Hires Sequence
The order matters more than the job titles. Get the sequence right and every hire makes the next one easier. Get it wrong and you spend year two unpicking year one.
Most founders hire in the order the pain arrives. Sales is drowning, so they grab a salesperson. The inbox is on fire, so they grab an admin. It feels responsive. It is actually random, and random is how a ten-person company ends up with three people it should never have hired and nobody doing the one job that mattered.
The fix is a sequence. Not my ten job titles, because yours depend on your business, but a fixed set of rules about order, speed and what each hire has to unlock before the next one happens.
The sequence
Hire for the work you do every day and resent
Your first hire buys back founder hours, nothing grander. List what eats your week that someone else could do to 80% standard. That is hire one. Cheap, quick, low risk, and it funds itself in reclaimed time.
Hire two and three double down on what already works
Not what is broken, what is working. If customers are coming from one channel, staff that channel. Momentum first, gaps later. Broken things get fixed by hire six onwards, when you can afford a specialist rather than a gamble.
The first senior hire is the slow one
Somewhere around hire four to six you will want a grown-up: an ops lead, a head of something. This is the £40k decision. Take three months if you need it. Meet them more than twice. Take references yourself, by phone, and ask the referee what this person is like on a bad week. Everything after this hire is shaped by it.
Write the pay bands before hire five, not after hire nine
The moment two people do similar work, you have a pay structure whether you wrote one or not. Decide it on paper while it is cheap. Retro-fixing pay at fifteen staff costs real money and at least one resignation.
Volume roles: speed wins
Below the senior line, a fast decent hire beats a slow perfect one. Mistakes here are cheap and coachable, and from 2027 your six-month window to fix them cleanly is the law's gift. Use a structured scorecard, decide within a week, and diarise the month-five review on day one.
Every hire needs one number
Before the ad goes out, write the single number this role moves: calls handled, jobs shipped, days of founder time returned. If you cannot name the number, you are hiring a vibe, and vibes do not survive probation reviews.
Why founders get it backwards
Because senior pain is loud and junior pain is quiet. The missing ops lead ruins your evenings, so you rush that hire; the junior roles feel low-stakes, so you drift. That is exactly upside down. The senior mistake compounds through every person they hire, every band they set, every corner they cut. The junior mistake costs you a month.
Rushing the top is how a wrong hire quietly bills you £40k: fees paid twice, an empty seat for a quarter, customers who felt the wobble, and a year of your attention spent managing someone out instead of building.
Do this today
Write your next three hires down in sequence, with the one number each must move. If a senior hire is on that list, double the time you planned to spend on it. And for anyone joining before year end, put the month-five review in the diary now, because from 1 January 2027 the clean-exit window shrinks to six months and the tribunal cap disappears.
I take a fixed number each quarter. Thirty minutes on your people setup, no pitch, you leave with a plan either way.
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