Ryan Deiss grades ten common early hires for startups at $2M revenue. Hire for sales, marketing, and customer success first. Delay the integrator, operations manager, and fractional CFO until your systems are actually built out.
Hires at $2 million in revenue. Project manager. D. I just think your people should be managing their own stupid projects at this point. That's like much later. Executive assistant. Ah, B. You should have an executive assistant at this point. If you don't, it's not the end of the world, especially in the age of AI. Head of sales. S. At $2 million, that's when it is time to exit the founder-led sales and to professionalize your sales and to get somebody else doing it, or you're gonna get stuck. Marketing lead. S, for the same reason that I said before. Everything's gonna be downstream from marketing and you don't have time to be your company's marketer. Integrator COO. F, do not hire an integrator or a COO at $2 million in revenue. You don't have enough of your systems in place. We need to build the operating system before we put the operators in to operate the operating system. An ops manager. For the same reason, I'm gonna say D, only because they're less expensive than the integrator COO, but you still do not need this at this point. That comes later. Customer success manager. A, and could be an S, but If there's one role that you're still gonna kind of take on at this point, I would have it be more customer-facing. Recruiter. It's getting there, not yet. I'm gonna say C. Account manager. B. Hopefully you have some account managers at this point. It could be an A, I'm gonna say B. A fractional CFO. You don't need a fractional CFO. I'm gonna say D. Get you a bookkeeper, maybe a controller. You don't need a fractional CFO yet.
