Martin Oduya’s first employee at Brackwood did not make furniture. She drove a van. In 2015 he was building maybe nine pieces a year, alone, and the thing that was breaking was not the making — it was that a walnut sideboard would leave his shop perfect and arrive at a customer’s house with a corner through the wrapping. So he hired a driver, bought a second-hand Sprinter, and spent another two years as the only person in the building who could cut a dovetail.
Eleven years and twenty people later, that hire reads like a mission statement. Brackwood is not a company about making a lot of furniture. It is a company about a piece of furniture arriving intact at a house, which is a different business with a different cost structure and a different kind of customer. Oduya didn’t write that down. He just hired it.
The tell
Every founder has a stated strategy and a revealed one, and the first hire is where the revealed one shows up before anyone has had time to dress it. The choice is usually made under pressure, with no money, on the basis of what is currently hurting most. That is exactly what makes it honest. Nobody performs a first hire for a board deck. There is no board.
The Sherwood Index has been coding first hires at 3,300 companies against what those companies looked like six years on, and the correlation it keeps finding is unflattering to the way founders talk about themselves. Firms whose first hire was in delivery, service or support were, six years later, 2.4x more likely to still be independent and profitable than firms whose first hire was a second version of the founder. Firms whose first hire was a salesperson had the highest revenue at year three and the highest mortality by year six.
The second-founder hire is the seductive one. You are drowning, the obvious fix is another pair of your own hands, and for about eight months it works beautifully. What it does not do is remove any of the work you are bad at, because your clone is bad at it too. Two people can now cut dovetails and neither of them has invoiced anyone since March.
I hired the thing I was worst at, not the thing I was busiest at. Those feel identical at the time and they are not remotely the same decision.
Reading the document
If you want to know what a small company actually intends to be, the org chart is useless and the first payroll line is not. A rough decoder, assembled from founders who were willing to be embarrassed in print:
- A driver, a fitter, an installer — the company has decided the product is the delivered thing, not the made thing. Margins will be lower and customers will stay longer.
- A bookkeeper — the founder has already been burned on cash and intends to grow slowly. This is the most boring first hire and the one with the best survival rate.
- An engineer, when the founder is not one — the company is committing to a product it cannot itself repair. This is either the right bet or the whole story.
- A salesperson — the founder does not want to talk to customers. Sometimes that’s a sensible division of labour. More often it is a founder outsourcing the one conversation nobody else can have for them.
- An apprentice — the company has decided its constraint is trained people, and has just accepted a four-year payback on its first payroll line.
- A second founder-shaped person — the founder wanted company. Everyone denies this one.
Maya Okonjo’s first hire at Fieldnote was Sam Devlin, an engineer, at a point when the company was mostly Okonjo driving to co-ops and writing routes by hand on a legal pad. She could have hired a second person to drive to co-ops. She has said the choice took about a day and settled what Fieldnote was: a software company that would be small and hard to copy, rather than a very good routing consultancy that would be busy forever. Sixty co-ops and roughly $1.1M later, the consultancy version is still visible in the rear-view — it would have made money faster and would have ended, she thinks, with fourteen employees and no product.
The practical use of all this is not for founders, who are going to hire whoever is standing there in the week the wheels come off. It is for everyone else. Before you sign with a small company, take a supplier on, or join one at fifteen people, ask who was first. You will get a short, unrehearsed answer about a specific person, usually with some affection in it, and you will learn more from it than from anything on the website.