Hiring a senior executive can look like the obvious answer when a founder has become the point through which too many decisions must pass.
Operations need more attention. Sales performance is uneven. Management information arrives too late. Delivery problems keep finding their way back to the chief executive. Eventually, the pressure acquires a job title: Head of Operations, Commercial Director, Chief Operating Officer.
That is often where the trouble begins.
A job created to relieve pressure is not necessarily a job designed to improve the business. Unless the underlying problem has been diagnosed, a company can spend heavily on a capable person only to discover that the workload, authority and expected outcome were never properly defined. The founder remains involved in the same decisions, while the new executive becomes an expensive extra layer.
Before beginning a search, there is a more useful question to answer: does the business need another senior person at all?
A bigger commitment than the salary suggests
Consider a director appointed on a base salary of £110,000.
At the 2026/27 rate, employer National Insurance adds about £15,750. A 5% pension contribution adds £5,500. A search fee of 25% adds a further £27,500. The first-year commitment is already approaching £160,000, before any bonus, car allowance, equipment, software licences or supporting hires are included.
The financial cost is only part of it. A new executive also absorbs time from the chief executive and the wider leadership team. Colleagues may defer decisions while they wait for the appointment to arrive. An internal candidate who sees the role filled externally may reconsider their own future. Priorities can remain in limbo during the search and onboarding period.
If the appointment ends after fourteen months, the business may have spent close to £250,000 once disruption and lost progress are taken into account. It then has to restart the search from a weaker position.
Research on hiring failure should be handled carefully, but the broad pattern is clear. A long-running Leadership IQ study involving more than 20,000 hires found that 46% did not succeed within eighteen months. Most of those failures were linked to attitude and fit rather than technical ability. The study is more than a decade old and uses a broad definition of failure, so the percentage should not be read as a forecast for any particular company. Its more useful lesson is that senior appointments tend to come unstuck because the mandate and the organisational fit are wrong—not because the successful candidate lacks a credible CV.
Those are risks a business can reduce before the first interview takes place.
Start with the business problem
When someone says, “We need a Head of Operations,” a proposed solution has already been mistaken for a diagnosis.
The starting point should be more neutral: what is not working, what effect is it having, and why is it happening?
In most cases, the answer sits mainly in one of four areas: capacity, capability, clarity or system. There may be overlap, but identifying the dominant cause is important because each calls for a different response.
Capacity
A capacity problem exists when competent people are working through a sensible process but no longer have enough time to handle the volume.
The test is straightforward: if the current team had twice as many hours, with no other change, would the problem largely disappear?
If it would, more resource may be justified. That does not automatically mean a director-level appointment. Many businesses respond to pressure at the top by hiring at the top when the real need sits one or two levels lower. Others add people without first removing work that no longer deserves to be done.
Before approving a senior role, ask the existing team what they would stop doing if their workload had to fall by 20%. The answers often uncover redundant reporting, duplicated checks and inherited routines that nobody has challenged for years. Removing those activities may solve part of the problem without adding permanent cost.
Capability
A capability gap is different. The work is taking place, but the business has reached a level of complexity that its current team has not previously managed.
Forecasting may still depend on judgement rather than a reliable model. Pricing may have become inconsistent. Operational planning may rely on a spreadsheet that was adequate at half the current scale. The people involved can work harder, but effort alone will not give them experience they have never had.
Ask whether anybody in the company has solved this problem successfully in an organisation of the same size or larger.
If the answer is no, there is a strong case for bringing in senior capability. This is where an external appointment can be genuinely transformative: the right person recognises patterns, anticipates second-order problems and knows what “good” looks like before the business has had to learn every lesson itself.
Clarity
Some leadership teams are busy but not aligned. Decisions are revisited because no one knows who has the final say. Two executives assume they own the same result, while another important outcome has no clear owner at all. The founder settles disagreements informally, so the stated structure and the real structure are not the same.
There is a simple way to expose this. Ask three members of the leadership team, separately, who owns the outcome in question. If their answers differ, the primary problem is clarity.
Recruiting into that situation rarely helps. The new executive enters a contested space without knowing where their authority begins or ends. Existing tensions are not resolved; another person is added to them.
Define the accountabilities and decision rights first. Once that work is done, it may still be clear that an additional leader is needed. If so, the subsequent search will be for a much better-defined role.
System
A systems problem can easily resemble a staffing problem. Reports take days to assemble. The same information is entered in several places. Managers spend their time chasing updates, checking numbers and reconciling versions of the truth. Important knowledge sits in individual inboxes or in the heads of a few long-serving employees.
Look at the work in the affected area and estimate how much of it consists of re-keying, checking, chasing or assembling information that already exists somewhere else. If that accounts for more than roughly a third of the effort, adding management capacity may simply preserve a weak process.
This is also where the practical AI question belongs. Deloitte’s 2026 Human Capital Trends research found that only 6% of leaders believed they were making progress in designing effective interaction between people and AI. For a mid-market business, the opportunity is not to automate indiscriminately. It is to remove avoidable administrative work before paying a senior person to supervise it.
A £110,000 manager should not be the workaround for disconnected systems and manual reconciliation.
Let the diagnosis determine the response
Real situations seldom fit one category perfectly. A stretched operations function, for example, may face both a capacity shortage and an unclear division of responsibility. The purpose of the test is not to force a tidy label onto a complicated business. It is to identify the factor doing most of the damage.
The practical conclusions are:
- If capacity dominates, add resource only after checking the appropriate level and removing unnecessary work.
- If capability dominates, a senior appointment may be the right answer and should be treated as a serious search.
- If clarity dominates, settle ownership and decision rights before hiring.
- If systems dominate, improve the process, data or technology before adding another management layer.
This discussion needs to happen before a title, salary range or candidate profile has been agreed. Once a proposed role becomes part of the internal narrative, evidence tends to be interpreted in its favour.
Define the mandate before describing the job
Where the diagnosis supports a hire, the next task is not to write a conventional job description. It is to define the mandate.
A job description catalogues responsibilities. A mandate explains what must change as a result of the appointment. Strong candidates want to understand the latter: the result they are being asked to produce, the authority they will hold and the conditions they are inheriting.
A useful mandate can fit on one page. It should cover six points.
The twelve-month outcome.
State in one sentence what will be measurably different after a year. “Improve operational performance” is too loose. “Increase gross margin on installed projects from 22% to 28%” provides a result against which choices can be made.
Decision rights.
List at least three material decisions the appointee will be able to make without seeking approval from the founder or board.
If the leadership team cannot identify three, the role is not ready. An experienced executive who discovers that every meaningful decision still belongs to the founder will either retreat into coordination or leave.
Budget authority.
Specify the amount the person can commit and the conditions attached to it. Leaving this implicit creates friction almost immediately, particularly when the external hire has come from a larger business with very different assumptions.
The inherited position.
Describe the starting point candidly. Include the systems that do not connect, the unresolved people issues, the demanding customer and the initiatives that have already failed.
This is not a reason to make the role unattractive. It is how both parties establish whether the candidate wants the real assignment rather than the polished version presented during recruitment.
The first ninety days.
Agree three or four concrete priorities in advance. A new executive should still have room to assess the situation and challenge assumptions, but they should not need to invent the purpose of the role after joining.
Measures at six and twelve months.
Write down how progress will be assessed, using numbers where possible. The founder and the incoming executive should agree these measures before the start date.
Completing these six fields will do more to improve the odds of a successful appointment than adding another page of duties to the job specification.
Make the value case as carefully as the cost case
With a clear mandate, the company can assess the economics properly.
Begin with the base salary, then add employer National Insurance, pension, the search fee, target bonus, equipment, licences and any additional headcount the executive will require. The result is the actual first-year commitment, not the number that appears in the offer letter.
Next, estimate the annual value of delivering the mandate. A six-percentage-point improvement in gross margin on £8 million of project revenue is worth approximately £480,000. Against that outcome, a fully loaded employment cost of £165,000 may be entirely reasonable.
“Better management information” cannot be assessed in the same way. If the intended benefit cannot be expressed with enough precision to judge its value, the mandate needs more work.
As a practical rule of thumb, a senior role in a mid-market company should have the potential to create or protect value equal to at least three times its full cost. This is not a universal benchmark, but it is a useful challenge. A weaker return may not compensate for the financial risk and organisational disturbance of a permanent appointment.
A permanent executive is only one option
Even when the business needs senior expertise, a full-time hire is not always the right way to obtain it. There are five common shapes to consider.
Full-time and permanent.
This works when the capability gap is lasting, the work is continuous and the mandate is valuable enough to support the cost. The role should still be designed around an outcome rather than around the general desire to have a senior person present.
Fractional or part-time.
Some businesses need high-level judgement but not five days of it each week. Finance, marketing and technology roles often lend themselves to this model.
A finance director who has operated in a £50 million company and works two days a week may create more value than a less experienced full-time hire at a similar cost. The arrangement fails when the company treats the fractional executive as discounted full-time capacity and fills their limited hours with routine administration.
Interim.
An interim appointment suits a defined assignment with an identifiable end: implementing a system, opening a site, restructuring a function or establishing the first robust budgeting process. The daily rate is higher, but the commitment is shorter and the brief can be tightly linked to delivery.
Promote internally and add support.
An existing colleague may have the ability and credibility to step up but lack experience of the next stage. That experience can sometimes be supplied through a non-executive director, adviser or coach.
This option retains company knowledge, costs less than an external search and demonstrates that progression is possible. That last point matters. McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2026 research found that 47% of the 10,000 executives surveyed regarded limited career progression as the largest barrier to high performance. An external appointment has an effect on the people who remain, not just the person who is selected.
Repair the system.
If unclear ownership, weak processes or inadequate tools are the main cause, spend the money there. Improving workflows and decision rights is often less expensive than recruiting someone to navigate around their defects.
The right delivery model is much easier to choose before a search begins. After several good candidates have been interviewed, personal preference and momentum make it difficult to step back.
Warning signs that the role is not ready
No recruitment process is perfect, but the following signals should prompt a pause:
- The role was proposed after a single incident rather than as part of an agreed plan.
- Nobody can describe the intended result in one sentence and attach a number to it.
- The founder cannot identify three decisions the new executive will make independently.
- The title is broader and more impressive than the actual assignment.
- Budget authority has not been discussed.
- A credible internal candidate exists but has not been told where they stand.
- The previous holder of a similar role left within eighteen months and the reasons were never examined.
- The role is repeatedly explained as “someone to take this off me.”
The last phrase is particularly revealing. It expresses a reasonable need for relief, but it says nothing about the business result the appointment must produce. Relief for the founder may follow from a well-designed role; it is not, by itself, a mandate.
Protect the appointment after the search
Good recruitment does not compensate for weak integration. The first six months determine whether the authority promised during the search exists in practice.
Three disciplines materially improve the chances of success.
First, agree the ninety-day priorities before the person starts. Second, give them a consequential decision in the first month and resist taking it back when their judgement differs from the founder’s. The rest of the organisation will notice whether the new authority is genuine. Third, hold a formal review around day 100, using the original mandate rather than general impressions.
That review is easy to postpone. If the appointment appears to be going well, it can feel unnecessary; if doubts have emerged, it can feel uncomfortable. Both are reasons to hold it. Problems that lead to an exit after a year are often visible after four months, when there is still time to correct them.
Before you enter the market
The sequence matters: diagnose the gap, define the mandate, calculate the economics and choose the right form of support. Only then should a search begin.
Many companies that complete this exercise will still recruit, but the role they take to market is usually sharper. The level may change. The boundaries become clearer. Candidates can see the result they are being hired to deliver and the authority they will have to deliver it.
Other businesses will discover that the proposed £160,000 appointment was actually a £40,000 process problem—or an accountability problem that costs nothing to resolve.
If your leadership team is considering a senior appointment, Allington Advisors can test the mandate with you before the role goes to market. If a hire is the right answer, we can lead the search. If it is not, we will say so.