One of the hardest things to do as a founder

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Traditional agencies drain your budget with hefty commissions and slow, one‑size‑fits‑all processes. Here’s why founders are swapping in a fractional recruiter:

• Slash hiring burn. Pay an hourly rate—no 20–25% commissions eating your runway.

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• Move at your pace. Scale hours up or down as hires roll in—month‑to‑month, no long‑term lock‑in.

• Own the full process. From outbound sourcing to final offer coordination, your recruiter embeds like an in‑house teammate.

Ready to reclaim time and budget for product, not paperwork? Learn how founders are hiring 4× faster →

🔗 Jake’s Picks

Must-Read Resources for Founders

🚀 Scaling Startups

• More with less: How AI startups are scaling rapidly with lean teams, high revenues (MoneyControl)

🧠 Founder Self-Development & Mental Health

• Brace yourselves, the ice bucket challenge is back (The Guardian)

📈 Productivity Hacks

• Top entrepreneurs tell you why simplicity is the ultimate business hack (YourStory)

🛠 Tools for Scaling

• Making spreadsheets sexy again: Canva zeroes in on productivity tools for latest product roll out (Startup Daily)

💡 Hiring Insights

• Hiring is just the first step - here’s what actually makes people stay (Forbes)

👀 ICYMI

• The smallest companies are operating like major goliaths (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🔎 Teams can’t follow old rules forever

Duct tape and bubble gum - the things that hold the company together in the early days, at least that’s what it feels like.

What gets you from 1 to 5 people, however, isn’t what will get you from 5 to 10, and beyond.

As you scale it’s so easy to want to cling to what worked early on, almost like a security blanket.  But this is exactly what creates a dangerous lag in your business, where your team evolves, the market shifts, but your systems are stuck in a version of the company that no longer exists.

In order to scale your company, sometimes you have to build, and other times you need to shed.

Focus on process ownership, as well as adherence

It shouldn’t just be you or your leaders having an opinion on your workflows - other team members should also do this.  They’re closer to the daily action and see things in real time much more frequently than you do.

Give employees permission to question how things are done, not just follow the playbook.

Once a month have each team bring forward one process they think can be improved.  Having these conversations normalizes evolution and builds a culture of continuous refinement.

Detach from your tools

Expect for there to be some change in the tools that you use as the company grows.  In fact, you should plan for this, forecasting what your needs could be when you hit certain milestones.

It’s good to audit your tool stack every quarter to see what’s creating friction and what’s moving you forward.

Even further, if you see team members creating their own workarounds instead of using the tools at their disposal, that’s a telling sign that your current tools aren’t keeping up with how your teams operate.

Document current state, not yesterday

As much as you may get hung up on how things were done in the past, as the company, teams, and processes evolve, so too should your documentation.  Updating SOPs isn’t just good housekeeping, it’s a signal to the teams that your company is evolving and the expectation is that they evolve alongside it.

The easiest way to make this happen is to have your team members own the documentation.  Again, they’re the closest to the action but it also reinforces the team’s buy-in and their sense of relevance within the work.

🕊️ Your own growth is in letting go

A hard realization for founders is the fact that the version of you who stayed up late, cold emailing prospects, while building a product and everything around it, is no longer the version your company needs.

To go from being the builder and answer for most things to stepping aside and letting the supporting cast do the work can be a hard pill to swallow.   However all great CEO’s have had to do this, and it only helps your company hit the scale you worked so hard to achieve.

True growth requires reinvention, not only in your systems, but also in yourself.

Watch what you say, and how you say it

The reflex to say “We’ve always...” is one that you’ll want to pay close attention to, if you’re trying to evolve your old ways of thinking.  You’ll find this shows up in hiring, meetings, product decisions, ops, you name it.

This is the default mode for most founders however what you say and how you say it should be linked to scale, not comfort.

As an example...

When you onboard are you still doing 1:1’s?  Skip a step and record a Loom walkthrough to speed up the process.  Or simply hand the process off to a team lead so that they can claim ownership. 

Insert yourself strategically in the process, not just to get the process completed.

Delegate your thinking

It shouldn’t always be on you to design the perfect workflow - hire and empower people who can do this for you.

Let your head of ops redesign any internal task management setup you originally built out.

Or ask department leads to run quarterly “what’s broken and what’s bloated” sessions and provide blanket approval to have them own the fixes without waiting for your personal sign-off.

Establish trust to move faster

There’s really no need to hold on to familiar tools or habits just because they still kind of work.  In fact, this prohibits your teams from suggesting or trying better ones.

Let go of being the final approver for everything and trust the systems you and your teams have built to make final decisions instead.

This could be setting clear thresholds, like budget approvals under certain clip levels, that let your teams move faster.

Or fully removing yourself from recurring meetings freeing up your own time to handle other matters while encouraging your teams to find their own rhythm without having the founder in the room for everything.

Every startup has a moment where speed is no longer what will drive you forward.  It’s at this point that intentional change becomes that much more important, refreshing how things are done.

It can be hard to see change as anything besides abandoning what used to work, even though you’re technically  choosing what works now.

That said, the faster you unlearn your old ways, the faster you’ll scale.

Founder Toolkit: 3 Lessons from Unicorn‑Grade Recruiters

Recruiting playbooks borrowed from Uber, Dropbox & Spotify

1. Build a Perfect‑Fit Profile First. Nail your candidate spec on paper—then source. That’s how you avoid dozens of misfits and focus only on high‑probability matches.

2. Leverage Asynchronous Updates. Weekly video recaps keep every stakeholder aligned without extra Zoom calls.

3. Scale on Your Schedule. Bring recruiting capacity up or down month‑to‑month as hiring needs ebb and flow—no 25% commissions required.

Ready for hands‑on support from recruiters who built the playbooks at high‑growth startups? Get started here →

🎬 TLDR — Your Actions For The Week:

• Scale Your Team → Audit your tool stack quarterly so teams only have what they need

• Scale Yourself → Review meetings that can be done without you and remove yourself

Whenever you're ready, here’s how I can help:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.