Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Early Hires Don’t Need Freedom—They Need Frameworks

3 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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A short spoken excerpt from Cameron Herold advising early-stage companies to constrain hiring and force optimization. He recommends giving early hires a clear container (constraints) — e.g., a hiring ratio tied to revenue — to counter Parkinson's law, and to prioritize automation, optimization, saying "no more," and hiring people who think within such constraints.

Chapters

Early stage, people are going to tend to say, I need a person, and that person needs a person, and that person needs a person they need to be set up with. That isn't an option. It's kind of like, you know, we're on the moon and we have to do something. We don't have the options of people. There's no people here, right? So just give them that restriction. Like Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill the space that we give it. Give the people a container and say, you know, for every $20 million in revenue, we're allowed one person, or for every 20 million, we're allowed two people. Give them a container and force them to think within that. How do we automate? How do we optimize? How do we say no more, and then hire people that are really good and really think that way.