WHY HIRING A FULL-TIME CHIEF OF STAFF TOO EARLY IS THE WRONG MOVE

Most founders I speak to at the €2–10M stage hit the same wall eventually. They're overwhelmed, decisions are backing up, and everything seems to need their input. The instinct is to bring in someone senior who can own the operational layer and free them up to lead.

The instinct is right. The hire is usually wrong.

The founders who struggle most aren't the ones without help. They're the ones who reach for a Chief of Staff before there is anything for that person to scale. And they only realise it six months later.

THE PATTERN THAT KEEPS REPEATING

The founder correctly diagnoses the problem: too many decisions, too many threads, nothing moving fast enough. They reach the right conclusion. They need leverage. Then they hire for the wrong thing.

Instead of someone who absorbs ambiguity and builds systems, they hire someone who manages tasks. The difference sounds subtle. It isn't.

Month one feels like relief. Calendars tighten. Notion boards appear. Weekly check-ins begin. It looks like progress because it looks like order. By month two the underlying problem is unchanged. Decisions are still bottlenecked on the founder. The hire is tracking work, not reducing cognitive load. Every question that comes back is a variation of the same thing: what should I prioritise, how should we handle this, can you approve this.

The founder is still the CPU. Just with better documentation.

Month four is when it lands. The founder is running through the week with their new hire. The hire asks which of three things should come first. The founder answers. Another decision surfaces from another team. The founder answers that too. Twenty minutes later the founder is still deciding everything.

The hire is holding the notebook.

That's when the thought arrives: we hired too early. Not exactly. What they actually did was hire someone who organises work instead of someone who changes how work happens.

WHAT GETTING IT WRONG ACTUALLY COSTS

The cost of a mis-scoped Chief of Staff hire is rarely the salary. It's time amplification.

If a founder is the routing layer for seventy percent of cross-team decisions and they are running three or four teams, that is easily fifteen to twenty decisions a week that shouldn't be theirs. At twenty minutes each, that is a full working day. Every week. Across a year, that is roughly fifty days spent keeping the system running instead of building the company. A Chief of Staff hired to fix this but who doesn't actually shift the ratio costs that time indefinitely, plus their salary, plus the time spent managing them.

A full-time Chief of Staff at this stage typically runs to six figures fully loaded once you add employer contributions. Before they know the business, before they've built anything, before you know whether the fit is real.

THE NUMBER WORTH KNOWING

There's a pattern that tends to show up before founder burnout arrives. If more than seventy percent of cross-team decisions still land with the founder, the company eventually stalls. Execution slows. Leadership becomes passive. The founder becomes the bottleneck and pays for it in stamina.

A well-scoped Chief of Staff gradually moves that ratio: founder decisions down to thirty or forty percent, team decisions up to sixty or seventy. That shift alone changes the growth ceiling. A strong hire should remove around thirty percent of founder operational load within six months. Not instantly. But by month six the founder should be attending fewer meetings, receiving fewer escalations, and spending less time on internal coordination. If the number is closer to ten percent, the hire is almost always mis-scoped.

WHAT THE FIRST SIX MONTHS ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE

A good Chief of Staff doesn't create leverage immediately. The first weeks are spent understanding how the organisation actually works: how decisions move, where authority really sits, which meetings exist because they're useful and which exist because nothing else replaced them. From the outside it can look slow. In reality the hire is building the context required to act.

The first genuine leverage tends to appear in months three and four, through structural shifts: removing recurring meetings, turning founder decisions into written frameworks, inserting decision owners inside teams.

Months five and six are when the role becomes uncomfortable in the right way. A good Chief of Staff questions founder instincts, blocks projects, and pushes decisions back to leaders. If a Chief of Staff never becomes mildly uncomfortable to the founder, they're an EA with strategy exposure.

That timeline comes from how the role is usually structured. When someone is hired into a broad remit and expected to discover the problem themselves, diagnosis takes months. When the design work comes first, leverage appears earlier and dependency doesn’t build in the same way.

THE PROBLEM UNDERNEATH THE PROBLEM

Early-stage companies grow faster than their operating models. What worked when the founder was across everything stops working once the organisation becomes larger and more specialised. Decisions queue. Priorities shift between conversations. Information travels through people rather than through structure.

Hiring a Chief of Staff into that environment doesn't fix it. It adds a person to it. The new hire coordinates the chaos. Things run a little more smoothly because someone is actively holding it together. But the underlying model hasn't changed.

What the business needs is for chaos to stop being the operating model. That requires designing how decisions move, where authority sits, and how leadership teams operate week to week. That's a design problem, not a headcount problem.

The founders who benefit most from a Chief of Staff are not the most chaotic ones. They're the ones who are already structured but overloaded. A Chief of Staff amplifies an operating system. If the founder has none, the Chief of Staff spends the first months inventing one. If the founder has a rough one, a good Chief of Staff can scale it quickly. That difference alone can determine whether the hire works in three months or twelve.

WHEN THE HIRE ACTUALLY WORKS

Founders who genuinely need one are usually running larger, more complex organisations. The operational layer already exists and needs dedicated leadership. There's a large executive team, multiple product lines, international expansion, or imminent fundraising adding real organisational complexity.

At €2–10M, most businesses aren't there yet. Some never will be, and don't need to be.

THE ENGAGEMENT THAT ACTUALLY SOLVES IT

The issue isn't the role and it isn't the contract type. A Chief of Staff hired to stay will build a system around their continued presence. When they leave, the institutional knowledge tends to leave with them.

What changes the outcome is the intent behind the engagement and what it's designed to produce. The design work comes first. That means diagnosing what is actually broken, building the infrastructure to fix it, and structuring it to run without the person who built it.

A Chief of Staff hired to stay is optimised for continuity. This kind of engagement is optimised for independence.

That is a different brief from the one most founders reach for when they are overwhelmed. It is time-limited, specific, and designed to make itself unnecessary.

THE QUESTION WORTH ASKING BEFORE YOU HIRE

If you're overwhelmed and things are slipping, that's real and worth solving. But before you hire someone to manage the situation, ask a different question.

Execution should not depend on stamina. Do you need someone to carry the system indefinitely, or do you need the system itself to start carrying the work?

That's the work I do at TMR & Co.