A founder said this to me last week about his own company. About people he likes and rates:

"The team that got us to five won't get us to ten."

He wasn't being harsh about them. Everything he said was fair.

And he'd clearly been carrying it around for a while before he said it out loud.

If you're somewhere between two and ten million, this email is the one I'd most want you to read this month.

 

Why everything works until it doesn't

Up to about three to five million, a founder can absorb almost anything.

You are the overlap.

When a role is fuzzy, you fill the gap.

When someone underperforms, you quietly do the missing part yourself at nine in the evening.

When a project stalls, you push it.

None of that shows up in an org chart. It shows up as you being tired.

And it works. That's the confusing part.

The absorption genuinely gets a company to five million, which is why nobody questions it.

Then it stops scaling, because there's more of it than there is of you.

Alex Hormozi puts the hardest stretch at three to five million, and I think he's right for a reason that's specifically brutal:

The talent that gets you out of that zone is expensive enough that hiring it takes your profit close to zero for a while. So the moment you most need a senior operator is the moment you can least comfortably pay for one.

Most founders resolve that by hiring cheaper and hoping.

Which brings me to the trap I see most often.

 

The promotion you never actually gave

It goes like this.

Someone joins as a manager. They're good.

Conscientious, reliable, strong operationally, genuinely cares.

The company grows, so you give them help. A part-time person. Then a working student. Then someone else who reports to them.

In your head, that was a promotion.

You just built a team under this person, which obviously makes them the head of the function.

You never said it. There was no new title, no new job description, no conversation about what the role now involves.

And here's what you find out eighteen months later: they never took it that way either.

Not because they're difficult.

Because being responsible for other people is a completely different job from doing the work well, and plenty of excellent operators genuinely don't want it.

They don't want to chase colleagues. They don't want to run someone else's performance.

Just last week my sister told me that she hates having to train a new role in their company.

She can't stand it.

She wants to do her own work, do it properly, and go home.

That's a legitimate preference, not a character flaw. The failure is that nobody ever said the role out loud, so it quietly stayed on your desk.

 

Two questions that settle it in about a minute

If you're not sure whether you have a leader in a function or a very good operator in it, these two answer it.

One. Would this person ever come to you and say "let's plan next quarter"?

Not react well when you say it.

Initiate it.

If strategic initiative only ever travels from you outwards, and never comes back the other way, you don't have a head of anything.

You have a capable operator and an unfilled role above them.

Two. Do they walk into the numbers meeting having already read the numbers?

If the meeting is where they see the performance for the first time, the meeting is doing the preparation.

Someone holding the function arrives with a view, a question, and something they want to change.

That founder's version of this was blunt and it stuck with me.

Their person listens, participates, is pleasant, and then goes back to the operational work.

What they never do is say here's what I think our takeaway is.

 

What it actually costs to fix

Since he asked me directly, here's how I'd think about the number.

I'm not going to hand you a salary, because what this role costs in Berlin, London, Lisbon and Austin are four different conversations. Hold it as a multiple instead.

A first-time head of marketing, someone who was a strong senior manager stepping up, costs roughly what a good senior specialist already costs you in your own market. That's a bet on someone learning the role at your expense, and sometimes it's exactly the right bet.

Someone who has genuinely taken brands from five million to twenty costs two to three times that, wherever you're hiring. There's no version of that conversation where they're cheap.

Work out both numbers this week, in your own currency. Look up what a strong senior marketing manager actually earns where you hire, then double it.

The gap between those two numbers is the whole problem in one line. Most brands at five million can afford the first and need the second.

 

Three things about money that took me too long to learn

More money doesn't fix a performance problem.

That founder's line: he gave a very good raise last year and nothing changed.

People don't become cleverer, or more organised, or more diligent because the number went up. Pay solves recruiting and retention. It does not solve capability or motivation.

You can only incentivise what someone controls.

He wanted to tie his marketing lead to profit, which is the theoretically correct metric because it aligns everyone.

But that person had no influence over ad budgets.

A profit-linked bonus for someone who can't move profit can suck a lot.

It breeds resentment when it misses and teaches nothing when it lands.

So tie the variable part to what the role genuinely owns: processes shipped and actually adopted, response times, whatever that seat really moves.

And build quality criteria into it, so nobody can game the number by splitting one piece of work into three.

A bonus judged once a year is a punishment, not an incentive.

If someone can't see where they stand continuously, all you've built is an annual surprise.

Everyone assumes they're doing a great job, because most people do.

The bonus has to come with visibility, or don't run one.

One more thing underneath all of it: people want different things out of the job.

Some are optimising for career, and for them the ladder is the motivator.

Others are optimising for time, and paying them more just funds a better holiday.

Neither is wrong, and the mistake is offering the same deal to both.

 

The exercise, and then the honest choice

Take twenty minutes this week and write down every decision that currently routes through you.

Then split the list in two.

Decisions that need your judgment, which is the founder's actual job. And things that just need someone to follow up, which is not.

The second column is the role you're missing.

It usually turns out to be much larger than expected, and it's almost never the role you thought you were about to hire.

Then choose, honestly, between three options:

• Promote someone, and say it out loud. New title, written scope, explicit conversation about what changes and whether they even want it. The implied version has never once worked.
• Hire the real thing, and pay the real number. Accept the profit hit for two or three quarters and treat it as the cost of getting past the zone.
• Accept that you're the head of marketing for another year. This is a completely legitimate choice as long as you name it, plan around it, and stop being surprised that strategic work keeps losing to follow-up work.

The version that doesn't work is the one most brands are running: hoping the role fills itself while the founder keeps absorbing the difference.

If you're in that zone and you can't tell which of the three you should pick, that's genuinely one of my favourite conversations to have, and I do a free 30-minute call for brands past $1M a year and $30K a month in ad spend.

Come with your decision list. It's usually obvious within about ten minutes, and occasionally the answer is that you don't need to hire anyone yet.

Talk soon,
Andrej

PS: Reply "layer" with the three decisions that most often get stuck waiting for you, and I'll tell you which role you're actually missing. It's rarely the one in the job ad.

PPS: Founders, every single quarter →