An Executive Hire Will Set A Business Owner Free, or Fail

Bringing in an executive is how most owners finally buy back their time. Do it wrong and you buy yourself a bigger, more expensive problem. Here's how to get it right, drawn from our latest HR Cartel Podcast with executive search specialist Dan Moussa of Third Way Advisory.

Every owner hits the same wall.

The business is working. It's growing. And you're the reason it can't grow faster, because everything still runs through you. The obvious move is to bring in a senior operator, hand them the wheel, and step back.

It's the right instinct. But most owners rush it. They hire to plug the gap in front of them, cross their fingers, and hope the person sticks. Eighteen months later they're back where they started, only poorer and more cynical about senior hires.

We sat down with Dan Moussa to unpack why. Dan founded the executive search firm Third Way Advisory and hosts the Founders Fire podcast. He runs search for founders, by founders. He's placed the kind of executive who changes a business, and he's watched plenty of owners get it badly wrong. The pattern is always the same, and it's fixable.

Fill a seat, or change the business

Here's the line that frames the whole thing.

"One hire fills a seat. The right hire will change your business." (Dan Moussa)

Think about your own team. Every owner has one or two people they'd describe as irreplaceable. The ones where, if they walked, you'd feel it for a year. Now ask the harder question. Why isn't every seat filled to that standard?

Usually because somewhere along the way you took what you could get. You needed a body, you found one, you moved on. That's a seat-filler. And at the executive level, a seat-filler doesn't just cost you their salary. It costs you the eighteen months you spend discovering they were never going to change anything.

Hire for 2029, not for Tuesday

Most owners hire for the problem in front of them today. Dan hires for the business you're building.

The question isn't what you need right now. It's where the business needs to be in three years, and who's the person who takes it there. You don't need that person in 2029. You need them now, so they're the one who builds 2029.

This is where a growth plan and a people plan have to meet. Plenty of owners can tell you they're doubling revenue by launching a new product or cracking a new market. Ask them who's actually going to deliver it and the answer is a shrug and a "we'll hire a GM."

Fine. But do the maths. A serious executive search runs around three months. Then your candidate has a three-month notice period. That's half a year before they walk through the door, and that's before they've learned your business. If your growth plan needs them in twelve months, you're already late. Executives don't grow on a tree you can pluck them off.

Do the pre-season

Dan's favourite frame comes from sport. Any team that wins a title says the same thing afterwards. The season was won in pre-season. Total alignment on the goal. No stone left unturned in the prep.

Almost nobody brings that rigour to a big hire. They take a brief, run to market, interview ten people, and announce they can't find the right person. They didn't have a talent problem. They had a preparation problem.

Real pre-season means three things.

First, do you even need to hire? Often, you don't. Sometimes the answer is already inside the building. And sometimes the smarter move is to outsource the function entirely rather than build a department around it. Dan's example lands close to home.

Owners come to him wanting to hire a Head of HR, when what they've actually told him is that they hate dealing with HR. Building an internal HR empire is the last thing that business needs. More on that below.

Second, get your stakeholders aligned. When two or three people are involved in the hire, say two co-founders, or a CEO and a CFO, they're often each running their own private recruitment process, hiring for the person they imagine.

Dan takes each one aside. Pens down. Tell me exactly what you expect this person to deliver in the seat. Then he reconciles the answers before anyone talks to a single candidate. No alignment, no hire.

Third, know what you're plugging them into. Owners love the idea of psychometric testing a candidate. But a personality profile is useless until you've mapped the culture and the team they're joining. Test the room before you test the recruit.

Set the seat up for success

Bringing a senior person in isn't only a recruitment task. It's a change event.

There will be people in your business who thought that seat was theirs. Bring an outsider in over the top without managing it, and you'll put noses out of joint before the new exec has said a word. So plan the internal message. Plan the story you take to the market about why this person is joining. That communication piece is the part almost everyone overlooks, and it's the part that decides whether your new leader lands with authority or resistance.

And before any of it, look at the design. There's always a system solution sitting alongside the people solution, and usually it comes first. Owners who "just need a person" often actually need a process, a structure, or a function taken off the board entirely. Get the organisation built to hold an executive before you drop one into it.

The part that levels the playing field

Here's where stepping back gets real for an SME.

No one will ever have your drive, your knowledge, or your appetite for this business. No hire replaces that. So the smarter question isn't who you hire to be you. It's what can come off your plate so you can do the parts only you can do.

HR, marketing, finance. Three functions that quietly drag on a growing business. For some businesses one of those is core and stays in-house. For most, it isn't, and building an internal department is the expensive way to solve it.

This is exactly why outsourced HR works. Dan's seen businesses of 200, 300, 400 people hand it over, and watched something click.

When there's no internal HR desk to palm problems off to, managers start actually managing. Problems get solved at the source instead of escalated. You end up with fewer problems, not more.

That's exactly what The HR Cartel is built for. You don't need a bigger HR department to step back with confidence. You need a sharper one in your corner. Corporate-grade firepower, built for a business your size, so the hard people stuff is handled while you get back to building.

The takeaway

Stepping out of the day-to-day is the goal. But you don't get there by throwing a body at a seat and hoping.

Do the pre-season. Hire for where you're going, not where you are. Get the business built to hold an executive before you bring one in. And be honest about what should come off your plate entirely rather than become another department you have to run.

That's how you buy your time back for good. Not just until the next bad hire lands it right back on your desk.

This piece draws on our conversation with Dan Moussa (Third Way Advisory) on Episode 099 of The HR Cartel podcast. Worth your commute. Dan's the real deal on getting senior hires right.

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Thinking about what to take off your plate before your next big hire? Run it past the Cartel.

Speak with The HR Cartel's Advice team on 07 5651 0066 or contact us here.