Discover Insight

What this guide covers: Your first sales hire is the highest-stakes recruiting decision you will make as a founder. Get

A refreshed draft focused on defining OKRs, common mistakes, and how founder-CEOs can make them work in a scale-up.

Stop chasing perfection. Find real customers, solve real problems, and learn faster than everyone else.

Just 21% of employees globally are engaged at work (Gallup 2025). The companies that beat that number share one thing:

Lee Smith went from DJ to jeweller to running IT firms, discovering mergers that changed everything.

Scaling’s not about speed—it’s rhythm. Nail the cadence, and growth becomes repeatable, not chaotic.

Founder-led sales never ends. It evolves. Step away completely and the pipeline quietly starts dying behind you.

Symbols and artefacts aren’t just office décor, they’re silent storytellers of your culture. Make them count.

Great sales reps don’t wait for leads. They generate them. Outsource that skill and your pipeline dries up fast.

Eric Partaker’s career looks like a cheat code from the outside. McKinsey, early Skype team. Multi-billion dollar exit to eBay.

Chief of Staff vs COO: if you are scaling and feel like the bottleneck, here is why a Chief of

“Jackie Weaver, no authority at all!”—the Handforth Parish Council is a prime example of team dysfunction.