A CEO explains why he promotes leaders from within his remote company instead of hiring external managers. Some team members have been with him 15 years across multiple ventures. Internal promotion saves money, embeds culture early, and avoids the cultural friction that outside hires often bring.
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I didn't hire external managers in. I didn't go and like hire a new leader for technology and sort of parachute a CTO in or anything. What I basically did is I've promoted from within. And remember that within is like people I hire from all over the world, right? You know, some of the people in my team have been with me for like 15 years and have actually followed me along the different businesses that I've built, right? I've kind of just naturally always gone to promoting people rather than bringing people in. It's interesting because it's linked back to something you said earlier, which is because you're fully remote and you're hiring the best people you can afford, you're taking a chunk of money. If you'd used that money to hire somebody in Birmingham, right, you might have got to the point where that person was okay at 30, was no good at 50, and terrible at 70. And also I think you get to shape them, right? As a founder, it sounds quite self-centered, I guess, but you shape people when they join the company early, how you want to work or how the company works. So then they become a leader and they're already like fully on board with the company culture, the history, the people, they know everything. It's not like something new. And the problem I think I've noticed with parachuting people in is that often they come with a different philosophy and sometimes that's really helpful, right? I imagine. But sometimes it also can be quite jarring for people.
