Q1 showed you what's broken

Not interested in hearing from Lean Leverage or Go Carpathian?

Every quarter, I talk to founders who already know exactly what's wrong.

They'll tell me: "My pipeline dried up when my SDR left in January." 

Or: "I've been doing ops myself for two months because I can't find someone I trust." 

Or: "I know I need to hire, I just haven't had the time to figure out the role."

Q1 made the problem obvious. The gap is right there. You can see it.

But most founders don’t know how to close the gap or wait until Q3 when the gap is too big to handle. 

Here's how it usually plays out. 

You skip the vetting. You take the first person who looks decent on paper. Three months later, you're back where you started with less money and less patience.

I've watched this cycle play out dozens of times. The founders who build strong teams don't hire when the pain becomes unbearable. They hire when they first see the gap.

Let's say you run an agency and your PPC team is maxed out. Every week without another specialist, your senior people are stretched across too many accounts, quality slips, and clients start asking questions.

The April hire isn't just earlier. They're better. Because you chose them when you had options, not when you had no choice.

A digital marketing agency came to us at the end of Q1 last year. 

They'd been growing steadily since 2012, but their PPC team had hit a wall. They were managing 24 to 27 active Google Ads accounts, and the workload was on the shoulders of just a few people. Senior staff were running campaigns, handling client reporting, and doing keyword research all at the same time. Something had to give.

They needed a Google Ads specialist.

Now, that kind of hire usually runs ~$7,000 a month. But, they didn't have that kind of room in the budget.

So we sourced from Eastern Europe and placed a certified PPC specialist with 7+ years of experience managing campaigns across Search, Display, Performance Max, and YouTube. 

Plus she already: 

Salary? $4,000/month full-time. No markup. The client hired her directly. 

She started in April. 

And, within weeks, she was managing a full book of accounts, the senior team had breathing room, and the agency had capacity to take on new clients instead of just holding on to what they had.

That's not unusual for us. 50% of our clients hire one of the first candidates we show them. 

You don't need a polished job description to start. You need clarity on one thing: what's the task that, if someone else handled it tomorrow, would free you up the most?

That's your first hire. We turn that into a role brief on the onboarding call. It takes 30 minutes, not 30 days.

And if you're not sure which region fits the role, here's a quick guide based on what we've seen work across hundreds of placements:

The Q2 hires are ramping, producing, and paying for themselves by June. The Q3 hire is still onboarding when the year is halfway over.

You already know what's broken. Q1 showed you. 

The only question is whether you fix it now or wait until it costs you another quarter.

If you're ready to stop planning and start building, book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll have vetted candidates in front of you within days.

Until next time,
Nathan