I’ve seen it time and time again. Founders raise VC money, feel that pressure to grow fast, and make what I believe is the single biggest mistake that kills early-stage businesses.

They mishire their go-to-market team.

The opportunity cost of mishiring is literally the biggest killer of early-stage SaaS companies. And most founders have absolutely no idea how devastating it really is.

The real cost of getting it wrong

Here’s what typically happens. You hire a founding account executive at 80K. Six months later, you realise they’re not working out. You do the math. 40K in salary plus benefits, maybe 60-70K total cost over six months. That stings, but it seems manageable, right?

Wrong. That’s only scratching the surface.

Let’s say you’ve got a 50K ACV business. That founding account executive you hired should have been creating 10 opportunities per month. That’s 500K of net new pipeline every single month. Over six months, that’s 3 million pounds worth of pipeline you’ve missed out on.

Taking an average B2B SaaS conversion rate of 30%, that’s basically 900,000 pounds worth of converted revenue that you’ve lost in that timeframe. And in one hire alone.

When you multiply that by a couple of account executives, maybe add a marketing hire that didn’t work out, a partner manager that flopped, you’re looking at hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions in lost opportunity if you’re running an enterprise SaaS business with 100K+ ACVs.

That’s the killer. That’s where most of the cash and time gets burned.

The warning signs everyone misses

What does a wrong hire actually look like? In my experience working with early-stage companies, there are some clear telltale signs that founders consistently miss:

The complainers

The biggest red flag I see is hiring people who come in complaining about everything. “We don’t have enough marketing.” “We don’t have this feature.” “Our competitors have a better product.”

When you join an early-stage company, you know what you’re signing up for. You know it’s not going to be the finished product. You need to be scrappy, sell value, and knock some doors down. If someone’s constantly complaining instead of getting creative with solutions, they’re not your person.

The big company people

Founders hire the big company veteran from their 5,000-employee competitor, thinking this person is going to be their golden ticket to figure everything out.

That’s almost always a mistake.

That person came from a company with excellent marketing, product-market fit, wicked partner programs, brand presence, and money to throw at conferences. Everything was already figured out. When they join your scrappy startup and suddenly don’t have all those resources, they struggle massively.

The lazy search process

The biggest thing I see is that founders don’t do a big enough search to get to the right person. They post a job for a couple of weeks, basically copy-paste a job description from somewhere, and hire someone from the first few people they meet, hoping for the best.

It doesn’t work.

For these early-stage companies, you need to run a proper process. We typically expect around 3,000 profiles to be reviewed for a founding account executive role. In reality, founders don’t have that time available, so they hire the first couple of people in front of them and away they go.

Six months later, they find out the person isn’t right, and they end up blaming that hire. “They weren’t good.” “They didn’t do this.” “They couldn’t do that.”

But the reality is it’s in the founder’s lap to run a proper process.

The ripple effect: How one bad hire destroys your entire team

Sales and GTM hires are high-risk because they’re more likely to go wrong if you don’t do proper due diligence. And when they do go wrong, the damage spreads like wildfire through your business.

Cultural destruction

It really ruins the culture of a business when you hire and fire salespeople in a short period. People start looking around the room thinking, “What’s going on here? This company hasn’t got their shit together.”

If you’re a 25-person company and you’ve hired and fired three salespeople in the last nine months, that’s basically 10% of your team that you’ve churned through. That’s a massive cultural red flag.

The domino effect

Because sales sits at the forefront of business growth, when your sales team fails, it makes everybody else look bad. You can have the best partner person, the best marketing person, the best CTO – but if you’re not converting opportunities, it makes everybody look bad.

There’s only so much that marketing director can do if you’re generating great opportunities but just not converting them because you keep hiring and firing salespeople.

The true financial impact

When we talk about the actual cost of mishiring, most founders only think about the obvious expenses:

• Salary and benefits – That 60-70K over six months
• Onboarding time – A couple of weeks of the founder’s time (and the opportunity cost of founder time is massive)
• Tech stack costs – HubSpot licenses, sales tools, GTM software
• Missing targets – The revenue you expected but didn’t get

But here’s where it gets really painful. When you combine all those things with that million pounds of missed opportunity I mentioned earlier, you’re looking at multiple millions in lost value.

And that’s just a single hire. If you get two or three founding AEs wrong, which a lot of these companies do, you’re looking at millions in lost revenue and wasted time, plus burned runway.

The valuation killer

If you’re not showing that aggressive month-on-month growth to your VCs, when you need to do another funding round, you’re impacting your valuation which means you end up giving away more equity for less money.

Every pound that you generate is worth 10-12x (sometimes more) on your exit valuation. 

So that person who could have generated a million in revenue? That’s probably worth more like 10 million pounds to your valuation.

Every pound you’re not closing has a knock-on effect of at least 10x. For high-growth companies, it’s often 20x, 30x, or more.

That’s the mindset you need to have.

Why Founders should slow down

It’s easy to rush when you raise VC cash. The VCs are pressuring you to hire, spend the money, grow fast. You’ve just raised three million quid, so spending 80 grand on that account executive feels like no big deal. You can become frivolous because you’ve got the money and the VC is telling you to hire.

But my advice is that when you raise capital, it’s actually the most important time to take a step back and reflect.

Sometimes you need to push back to that VC and say, “Actually, I don’t want to hire that founding AE yet. This is my plan for the next three months. I’m going to do founder-led sales a bit longer. I’m confident I can convert these opportunities in our pipeline – I’m best placed to convert them.”

Make sure you’re 100% right that now is the right time before you pull the trigger. 

Because once you do, the onus is on you. If that hire doesn’t work, the VC is going to interrogate you. “Why didn’t it work? We’ve lost time. We’ve fucked this up. We’re now behind target.”

And those targets don’t get easier, they get harder. Instead of that one million ARR target you had this year, it’s now 1.5 million because you’ve lost six months of runway.

How to get it right

If you’re going to do this yourself (and you should consider it), here’s what you need to commit to:

The search process should involve:

• Reviewing around 3,000 profiles
• Running a proper headhunting strategy
• Creating a compelling job description
• Targeting and attracting the best people through intelligent messaging
• Running a structured interview process with qualification calls, first-stage interviews, and task-based assessments

It’s a real investment of time, but it’s worth it when you find the right person.

The alternative? Work with a domain expert recruitment company that specialises in your space. They can run a proper search in the background while you focus on building the business and converting the opportunities you’ve already got in your pipeline.

The ROI of getting it right

The right account executive can completely transform the trajectory of your business.

If you hire the right AE and they generate a million in business, the ROI is a complete no-brainer. Remember that 10x+ multiplier on valuation? That person’s impact goes far beyond the revenue they generate, they’re adding 10-12x to your valuation year on year.

Invest the time upfront to slow down and speed up later.

When you find the right person, wrap your arms around them. Get in the trenches with them. Get scrappy with them. This is the person who’s going to add that 10-12x to your valuation, and the ROI should be crystal clear.