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

Why a "Hired Gun" CEO Can't Build Your Company

6 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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Cameron Herold argues that bootstrapped founders who build their own companies develop emotional resilience that hired-gun CEOs, typically MBA-trained executives brought in to run large organizations, rarely possess. Founders face daily failure and learn to push through it; hired guns excel at scaling existing operations but lack the mindset to take companies from good to great or great to world-class.

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As an entrepreneur, failure is something that hits us every single day. But if you're not used to it and it beats you up emotionally or it scares you or scars you, you're just not going to be that successful. So I think many entrepreneurs— and this is different from the hired gun CEO— the traditional hired gun CEO coming out of an MBA to run a 5,000-person company is very different from that person who is going to bootstrap build it, scale it, you know, and get it to that medium enterprise. It's kind of the good to great people are very different from the great to world-class people.