Ryan Deiss ranks ten common startup hires for a $500K revenue company. He gives A grades to customer success and marketing, D-F grades to recruiters and ops managers, and says founders should handle sales and account management themselves until they can afford better.
Ranking hires. Account manager. It's gonna depend on your business, but if you got clients, then I'm gonna say C. You should probably be doing a lot of your own account management at this point, but it's good to have. Recruiter. D, too early. Customer success manager. A, now's when we really need to make sure that the early people we have are happy, they're successful, and they're talking about us. Ops manager. D, you don't need an ops manager at $500K. Marketing lead. A, bordering on an S, but I'm gonna say A. Everything's downstream from lead generation. Head of sales. B, at $500K, you're still doing your own sales probably, but if it's going well, maybe. Executive assistant. F, you don't need an executive assistant if you're doing $500K. Put that money somewhere else. A COO. F, you don't need a COO at $500K. You are your COO. A project manager. No, god no. D, only because it's not as expensive as the COO, but no, manage your projects, figure it out.
