Richard CanfieldPodcast Host and IBC Advisor, Ascendant Financial · Authorized Infinite Banking Practitioner | Author of 4 Books

Most Founders Get Their First Hire Completely Wrong #startup #founder

5 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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Founders often hire for titles like COO or VP of Sales without clear outcomes, creating expensive mismatches. Early hires should be paid business partners solving specific problems, not filling positions. Define what you need them to achieve before you hire.

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For these smaller businesses, they're, these main hires are so important because they're, they're essentially business partners that are paid a salary, right? Unlike what I used in a description before of like a tech company where you're like, I need 40 full stack engineers because we're going into major dev to on, you know, because we want to scale to 100 million users. It's like this isn't what that's for. This is for that. Like those, those first five killer hires where a business owner doesn't really know what they need and so they start saying I need a coo, I need a VP Sales. Like yeah, but what does that actually mean? And that's where we focus on those outcomes. Like what are the outcomes? And if you don't have the vision and you don't have the objectives picked out on how to get there, then your hires are not going to, they're, they're going to be expensive over a long time as you figure it out together. So this is a way for these business owners to really like skip those, those messy steps. A few of the messy steps, like there's still going to be messy steps made, but it's to skip a few of them.