For startups
Hiring at a startup is its own beast.
I find senior finance leaders for consumer startups, from a first Head of Finance to CFO. Full-time or fractional. A fee only when the right person joins.
The person you bring in needs to move the product or the revenue forward, and they need to do it with minimal support. In a large company, a bad hire can be absorbed, but in a 15-person startup, it eats runway, slows everything down and drags the rest of the team with it.
So what does the right person look like? A few things I look for every time.
- They're comfortable with mess: priorities shift, the plan changes, and nobody has written the process down yet. Some people find that energising, but a lot don't, and it's better to find out before you hire them.
- They're useful from the first week: you don't have a twelve-week onboarding programme, so someone who has done the job before and can hit the ground running is crucial.
- They fit the budget: total compensation has to work against the runway, and equity has to mean something to them rather than just being a line on the offer. If it turns out to be the wrong call, you need to know quickly and act on it.
- They're a generalist first: deep specialists tend to struggle when the role changes shape, and at early stage it likely will. Someone who can solve problems outside of their lane is worth their weight in gold.
- They believe in the product: it sounds obvious, but it's often what carries people through the long hours and the lower pay, and it's what your culture ends up being built on.
Why not use a traditional recruiter, or do it yourself?
The main complaint I hear from founders about recruiters is that the incentives are wrong. Contingency firms get paid when a hire is made, so the pressure is to fill the role fast. Retained search firms get paid either way, so there isn't much pressure at all. Neither model rewards getting it exactly right.
What that looks like in practice:
- CVs matched on keywords rather than a real understanding of what the person can do.
- Candidates from large corporates who’ve never worked without a budget, a team and a process. Big company experience is useful, and it's probably where you want to end up, but it needs balancing with people who have done the early-stage bit.
- Light-touch vetting, so the real interviewing lands back on a team that's already stretched.
- Volume outreach that treats hiring as a numbers game that can damage how the market sees you.
- Going quiet when a role gets hard, or when a client with ten open roles comes along.
- Not understanding the role well enough, especially where it's specialised or still being defined, which means a pipeline full of people who were never going to work.
Doing it yourself avoids all of that, but it costs you the thing you have least of - time. A proper search for a CFO or a VP Sales is weeks of sourcing, screening and chasing, and it usually lands on the founder.
How I work
Before I open a search I want to spend time on your roadmap, your runway and how the team works today, because the right hire depends on all three.
Then I look for people who have moved a business forward at your stage, not people whose profiles read well.
You see a shortlist, not a pipeline. I do the screening up front so your calendar only takes the handful of people worth your time.
The best candidates aren't on job boards. I go to them directly and pitch your company properly, which means they arrive already interested and you're not the one doing the selling.
I handle compensation, equity and counter-offers early, so by the time the offer letter goes out there's nothing left to negotiate.
I’m highly selective and work on a very small number of searches at a time. If a hire doesn't work out within the first three months, I'll work to find a replacement.
If you want a sense of the numbers before we talk, the salary and equity benchmarks cover CFO, CMO, COO and Head of Customer at seed and Series A.
Thinking about a senior hire?
You don’t need to have the role fully figured out.
If you’re considering a senior hire in the next 12 months, book a 30-minute call. We can talk through the problem, the kind of person you might need and whether I can help.