When did you decide to hire a GM and not just another senior IC? Trying to make this call at $2M ARR and it doesn't feel obvious.
DTC food brand based out of São Paulo, $2M ARR, 18 people across operations, marketing, and customer service. We sell across Brazil and we've started shipping to Portugal and Spain this year. Founded in 2019, profitable since 2022.
I'm at the decision point where the next hire is either a GM/COO type or another senior IC. Most of the advice I've read says hire the GM when you can't keep all the strategic threads in your head. The thing is, I can still keep them all in my head. I'm just spending too many hours doing it, and the decisions are getting slower because every cross-functional call comes through me and I'm unblocking things in Slack at 11pm.
A full-time COO with significant equity doesn't feel right yet. The role would be 60% strategic and 40% glorified senior IC and I don't want to hire someone overqualified into a half-built job. My head of marketing is excellent at marketing and not interested in operations. My ops lead is solid but not strategic. Nobody on the team has been quietly raising their hand for the role. And continuing as founder-led with more delegation has been the plan for three quarters now. The bottleneck is still me. Not the team.
For founders who've made this call between $1M and $5M ARR:
Did you hire a GM or COO and what was the actual difference in title vs scope vs comp?
How did you handle the equity question for someone joining post-PMF but pre-scale?
What did you stop doing the week they started, and how much of it had to come back to you within 90 days?
Was the wrong hire here a fixable mistake, or did it cost you 12 months you couldn't get back?
And the one I keep coming back to: did your decision speed actually get better, or did you just trade a bottleneck-of-one for a bottleneck-of-two?
Not looking for "you'll know when you know." Trying to figure out the operational signal that this is the right hire vs another senior IC.