Growth stalls. Revenue flattens. The decision arrives quickly and it feels obvious: hire someone to sell full time.
Sometimes that is right.
Often it is not. When it is not, the reason has almost nothing to do with the person you hire. It is already inside the business. It has been building for years. A salesperson cannot reach it.
It starts with saying yes
In the early days, founders are exceptionally good at saying yes and working out the how afterwards.
You start a business to do X. Within a year you also do A, B and C, because that is where the revenue is, that is what people tell you they want, and the revenue keeps the lights on. So you adapt. If X alone had to carry the business, you probably would not have survived long enough to find out.
That is not a failure. It is how businesses find their market and build their model. But it is where the drift begins, and the drift lives in one place: the founder’s head. Everything is fast, reactive and unwritten.
Pricing works the same way. You price flexibly because you are testing what lands, and you would rather win the work than hold the number. You price below the competition and you can carry it, because your overheads are low and your margin holds up regardless.
You grow. Your reputation carries the business forward and you attract new customers. Things look rosy.
The margin trap
You recruit. Overheads rise. Your margin narrows on prices that were set for a business that no longer exists.
One day there is no growth capacity left. Not because demand dried up, but because every pound of revenue now funds less than it used to.
Here is the part that costs founders lost time, burnout and sleepless nights: that reads as a volume problem. The logic is clean, and it is wrong.
“We need more revenue. A salesperson sells more of what we do. Therefore revenue goes up and we are growing again.”
You do not have a volume problem. You have a margin problem, an infrastructure problem and a founder-dependency problem, stacked on top of each other. More volume through the same structure makes all three worse.
You have built a house of cards.
The maths nobody does
It does not matter whether the sales hire salary is £35k or £90k. The shape is identical.
Add oncosts. Add recruitment. Add the lead time before anything lands. Add onboarding. Then add the founder’s own time, which is the expensive part, because it is the thing the founder was trying to buy back in the first place.
All of that has to be earned back before the business reaches the growth the hire was brought in to deliver. That is the payback hurdle, and it sits on the narrowed margin the business has now, not the margin it had when prices were first set.
Most founders never write this down. It is uncomfortable arithmetic, and the hire is usually made on relief rather than on a model.
What the founder was actually doing
The other half of the problem is what is being handed over.
Ask a founder how they sell and you will hear about relationships. Watch them sell and you will see five commercial jobs running at once:
- Qualifying: Not against a scorecard, against developed instinct and memory. They know within minutes which buyer has already had the internal conversation.
- Pricing: They read risk, urgency and politics off the call, then price the version of the job that will land and win the business.
- Framing: They name the buyer’s problem better than the buyer can. That is usually where the deal is won, and it is rarely in the proposal.
- Selecting: They decide whether this is a client worth having. Founders turn work away on instinct and almost never record why.
- Underwriting: They carry delivery risk personally, so they know what can be promised. A new hire does not, so they promise everything to reach a target.
- Five jobs: One job title. None of it documented, because it was never knowledge. It was judgement, built over years of fast decisions nobody had time to write down.
The 90-day pattern
Recognise this if you have made a hire as a founder, or if you have been that hire.
Weeks 1 to 4: The honeymoon. Good energy, full diary. The founder exhales for the first time in a year.
Weeks 5 to 8: Pipeline theatre. The CRM fills up. Everything is “progressing”. Nothing closes, and nobody wants to be the one who says the pipeline is not real.
Weeks 9 to 12: The founder starts joining calls “just to help”. Stuck deals move. Everyone draws the same private conclusion.
Months 4 to 6: The founder is still teaching, and has jumped back in to save the day. Faith goes first. Then the salesperson, who finds the chaos unmanageable and the commission unreachable, starts looking elsewhere. Targets built on someone else’s instinct were never reachable, and nobody wants a termination on their CV when they look for the next sales role.
The salary is not the cost. The cost is the year, and the belief the founder now holds: nobody can sell this but me.
This pattern repeats often, and the mistakes are easy to make. Ask any founder how their new sales hire has landed and you will likely get the same shrug and the same scrunched face. Salespeople who have lived through it will recognise it from the other side too.
What was actually missing: the 5Rs of Commercial Infrastructure
The business was not missing a salesperson. Yet. It was missing infrastructure: the capability required to grow beyond founder-led execution. My 5Rs of Commercial Infrastructure explains more:
Repeatable: The founder knows how everything works. If it is not documented, it is not repeatable, and if it is not repeatable it cannot scale. This is not bureaucracy. It is documenting what works in your head so someone else can execute it reliably.
Reliable: Documentation creates repeatability. Systems create reliability. If something only works when the founder is in the room, it is not a system yet. It is founder dependency wearing a process diagram.
Resourced: This is the one that matters here. No founder excels at every dimension required for scale. Growth beyond a certain point needs leadership capacity that complements your strengths and covers your weaknesses, not a clone of you, and not extra execution capacity poured into a structure that cannot hold it. Most founders buy the second when they needed the first.
Responsive: Infrastructure has to enable adaptation, not prevent it. Experiment, measure, learn, iterate: embedded in how the business runs, not dependent on the founder noticing.
Resilient: The real test is whether the business survives transitions. A resilient business keeps operating, delivering and adapting regardless of who is leading. Otherwise it is not a business. It is a job.
Read the 90-day failure back through those five and it stops looking like a hiring mistake. Nothing was repeatable, so nothing was reliable, which means the wrong resource got hired, and the business could not adapt, while it all still rested on one person. It was the wrong solution.
The test
Before signing off any first commercial hire, ask one question:
Could someone else have won your last three deals using only what is written down?
Not someone brilliant. Someone competent, motivated and new.
If the answer is no, the job spec is not the problem. It is upstream of it, and no candidate at any salary will fix it for you.
Build the infrastructure. Then hire someone to run it.
That order costs less, takes less time, and works.
If this is where you are
If the 90-day pattern reads like something you have lived through, you are in good company. If your instinct is that it was a poor sales hire, you are likely to keep repeating it by churning through new recruits. The infrastructure question is usually the better place to start.
If you are weighing up that hire now, get in touch.
