Patrick White

To founders, margins are more than just numbers on a P&L. They’re proof of success, the result of hard work, and the foundations for scaling what started as a dream a few years ago. But as you scale, every hire you make either protects—or destroys—those margins. Poor hiring decisions quietly shrink profitability and make growth harder. Take a $150K hire: with ramp lag (months to deliver value), onboarding (weeks of team training), and inefficiencies (misaligned priorities, duplicate efforts), the real cost can hit $250K in year one. And if your gross margin is 50%, that hire now demands $500K in revenue just to break even. The Key Isn’t Avoiding Hiring—It’s Hiring for Impact, here's how you can get there: 1. Use the 3x Rule: Every hire should deliver 3x their cost in revenue, efficiency, or savings within six to nine months. - A $150K operations lead who automates processes and saves $500K annually? Multiplier. - A vague “general manager” who just adds meetings? Liability. 2. Hire Multipliers, Not Gap-Fillers: Multipliers make your team more productive. Gap-fillers add headcount without driving outcomes. - Instead of hiring another marketer, invest in a marketing operations lead who improves ROI across campaigns. 3. Ask before you hire: - Will this role deliver 2-3x ROI? - Does this hire amplify productivity—or just add costs? - Can your margins absorb the ramp lag? If the answers aren’t clear, revisit your systems. Your margins are your foundation—prioritize them with every hire.

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Is “launch early” bad advice? I always thought it was a cliche VC tagline… but (annoyingly) it actually works. We launched Accend (YC S23) publicly a couple of weeks ago with our press announcement in Axios, and the effects we’ve seen are incredible. More people booking demos, reaching out, wanting to join our team. Of course, it helps to have a product that does what it says and a line up of customers to give us more credibility. The hard part about launching early is learning how to separate the noise from substance. More people are booking calls with me through the link in my bio - but a lot of those conversations don’t go anywhere and aren’t a good fit for Accend. Even though it’s easy to get starry-eyed seeing the metrics go up, more demos doesn’t mean more conversions and more sales. You have to ringfence the core audience you’re trying to serve - for us, that’s fintech platforms and banks struggling with manual KYB - and double click into it. It takes a lot of focus and discipline to avoid getting distracted, but all-in-all it’s been a net-positive throwing ourselves into the spotlight. So even if you don’t feel 100% ready, just launch. You can always course-correct later.

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🌎 Deel: Proof That the Future of Work is Global 🚀 Hiring international talent used to be a nightmare. 🤯 Deel changed the game, growing to $500M ARR in just 5 years! 🤯 Why? 1. Remote Work is Rising: Deel helps companies build and manage distributed teams seamlessly. 📈 2. Global Talent Pool: Access the best talent, regardless of location. 🤝 3. Simplified Compliance: No more international hiring headaches. 🧰 Deel's success shows us: 1. Solve real problems. 🎯 2. Embrace the future. 🌊 3. Execute with speed. ⚡ What's your take on the future of work? 👇 #Deel #FutureOfWork #RemoteWork #GlobalTeams #LinkedIn

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How Aaron, co-founder of fast growing B2B accounting SaaS, under pressure to scale fast with no internal talent team, scaled their engineering team by 30% in 3 months (without overspending on traditional agencies): When Aaron reached out, they’d just secured funding. Great news, but they had to ramp up quick: - Increase engineering team talent - Increase product team talent They needed 9 high-quality hires, fast. But they had 3 big problems: 1. No internal talent team 2. Pressure to scale fast 3. High stakes for quality Recruiting was wrongly falling on leadership. Growth targets were big. Past experiences with bad hires was scary. It was crucial we nailed this for Aaron. But I knew Move could fix their hiring problem. We needed to do 3 things quickly: 1. Install a dedicated talent lead, sourcer and co-ordinator 2. Integrate with their hiring managers (extension to Aaron’s team) 3. Align with the brand to attract talent excited about the vision The difference to traditional agencies: not just a recruiter. We gave Aaron a support system with recruiters working constantly. But that’s not it. In just 3 months: - 9 high-quality hires, scaling Aaron’s team by 30% - 2 weeks average time to hire, hitting growth targets - £81,340 cost saving vs traditional agency fees Here’s the best bit though... Leadership was buzzing with the quality of hires, saying: “The quality bar has really been raised.” And Aaron was buzzing too: “The results have been fantastic. We scaled our team by 30-35% with high-quality hires, all without overwhelming our time or resources.” Securing funding should be exciting for a business. Don’t let the worry of hiring take that excitement away. P.S. if you’re a fast-scaling startup struggling with: - No internal talent team to manage recruitment - Pressure to hire quickly without compromising on quality - Concerns about the costs of traditional recruitment agencies - The challenge of attracting top-tier candidates to your mission - A lack of seamless collaboration with past recruitment partners And you want to scale your team efficiently, raise the quality bar and save on recruitment costs? DM me “Scale” and I’ll show you how.

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Next up in the series of posts about starting a startup for non-technical founders: 2. Finding a co-founder How do you even find one in the first place? For anyone who's tried, it's exceptionally hard. Let's start with the framework. You want to find: (a) Someone that has complimentary skills. Think one plus one equals three. (b) Someone equally passionate about the same problem. If you’re not equally excited about the challenge you’re tackling, it’s going to be hard to keep the momentum going. (c) Someone that is available - Timing. You both need to be available and ready to commit at the same time. After you go down this list, you might be lucky to know one or two people in your immediate network to work with. In terms of what you can do to navigate this stuff, there were 2 things that I thought would give me the best shot. One was immersing myself in a founder-dense environment like SF. Another was co-founder dating. The best matching platform I’ve seen is from YC. They have tons of profiles and make it simple to meet a lot of people quickly. None of this is easy, but all of it is possible. I will be sharing learnings from the process that Tennison C. and I went through (very different; I met 8 new people vs Tennison met 80 new people)—hope they’re helpful for anyone experiencing this.  --- Yesterday, we covered "Things you can’t say as a non-technical founder." For the remainder of the week, I will write about 3. Importance of a deep trial period 4. Investing in your co-founder relationship

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The software market is tough right now. But here's what you can do about it. Jamin Ball offers a clear-eyed view in his analysis of growth software. (I strongly recommend anyone in tech to check out his newsletter, especially execs, founders and revenue leaders. Link in first comment). Main Concern: Software sentiment has dipped to new lows— even lower than during the early days of Covid. With nearly 70% of software companies falling short in Q1 and expecting worse in Q2, morale is... not the best. Even in AI, which has been exciting to say the least, the financial outcomes are still underwhelming. Investing in AI technology and hiring AI talent requires significant upfront costs, which can strain profit margins before revenue starts to flow. Investors are left wondering which AI entities will truly breakthrough. Companies of all sizes are keeping a close eye on spend. What does this mean for founders and revenue leaders? Founders, first recalibrate your growth targets. Acknowledge the market headwinds. Targets that are too ambitious now carry more risks than potential gains. Focus on use cases that wow prospects with cost-savings and/or revenue increase. The market is taking a cautious wait-and-see stance, if you can't show a prospect blatantly obvious ROI with a short time-to-value horizon, you'll be up against it. Play the long game. The market swings, we all know this. Start thinking about how to grow your business profitably over the long haul. How to do that? 🧑‍🧒Be really good at hiring at this stage. You think hiring is expensive? Try hiring the wrong person. Getting the right people in the right role will give you the best chance to win deals and grow revenue. 💹Examine your GTM strategy: beware the trap of activity for activity's sake. Rebuild it all if you have to. But GTM teams should be lean and mean and focusing their efforts strategically on turning over the stones that have the highest likelihood of leading to revenue. 🏷️Pricing: Nail this. You must assertively justify your pricing based on customer value creation. Anything I overlooked? Share your insights in the comments! P.S. Need help hiring GTM talent for Data, AI/ML, Compute, and Cloud Infra? DM me. We've assisted successful early-stage startups (backed by Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, GV, Accel, and more) in finding A+ hires.

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49 founders and senior startup leaders respond to a survey from Sifted on the relationship between founders and VCs. Are expectations off from the start as VCs try too hard to pander to their founders with over promises of "value-add" and extensive platform teams? Do founders need to be reminded of their primary role - execution?

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If a VC can't take 5-15 minutes to truly understand the market you've spent years dissecting—they're not the right fit. Not every problem is 'obvious', especially when you’re innovating in niche spaces. That’s exactly why they’re hidden gems waiting to be discovered.💎 You’re not looking for just any VC; you’re looking for the one who sees the value in your deep dive.

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I often talk about ‘building something offline, before raising money’. This is the perfect example of what I mean👇 One of our portfolio companies Tradeaze UK LTD (it’s a biassed example, I’ll admit), identified a pain point: Co-founder, Jack, is an electrician by trade and saw first-hand the amount of time wasted by tradespeople when picking up tools and parts needed for a job.   To solve this pain point: ↳ Jack set up a Tradeaze iPhone, approached tradespeople on the street, handed out flyers and reached out on Facebook groups to his target audience. ↳ Tradies would text the number, asking for a part or tool. ↳ Jack would then jump on his bike to pick up the part and deliver it back to the customer directly. ↳ After a while, Jack started working directly with merchants providing them with a tablet in kiosk mode, with which the merchant would fill in a really simple form and Jack would receive the order email. ↳ Again, Jack or one of the delivery riders would take the part direct to the tradesperson in need. ↳ Jack continued this way until he got to breaking point and couldn’t handle any more daily deliveries. ↳ This is when he expanded his team to bring in even more experience with his co-founders Joe Blair and Ruben Engel. Since they have raised investment from us and other investors. They were able to prove their pain and solution offline, saving them money and time and proving traction to bring on investors ! Raising too soon, before proving you have the right solution is a huge risk. This is a fantastic way to build a business without needing to raise investment right away. Build offline first ! #businesstips #entrepreneurship #startups

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Doing more with less visualized by stage. It would be interesting to see this overlayed by revenue and profit margins to see the business impact of leaner teams.

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Founders Scaling Without the Chaos Every growth phase needs a new structure—but I’ve had some first hand both experiencing and noticing founders stumble with these 2 things: - Hold onto too much- You create bottlenecks and burnout. - Hire too fast- You bloat your team and slow everything down. An easy way to transition/focus: 1️⃣ Startup Phase - Founders juggle operations, marketing, and sales themselves. - Once revenue stabilizes or you hit 50+ customers, start handing off key tasks. 2️⃣ Scaling Phase - Bring in role leads (product, customer success) instead of full teams. - Now’s the time to focus on building systems—let your team handle the details. 3️⃣ Mature Phase - Shift fully into strategic leadership—build cross-functional teams and a leadership pipeline. - When daily operations slow you down, step back and let others lead. The key? Stop managing and start designing. Build a system that scales without you. #founders #Startup

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VC's pour money into unprofitable startups like Uber for years. Ever wonder how they make money? There are many different stages of VC investment, for the below we will look at funds that deal with early stage companies. They invest in companies that are just an idea, through to a little bit of traction and revenue. 📈 How They Generate Returns VC firms create funds that investors can put their money into, in the early stage these funds are $5m to $50m. VC firms use those funds to invest in startups that they believe will 'return the fund' - if this company succeeds then it doesn't matter if every other investment fails. They do this because most fail. Here is what 100 investments could look like: ‣ 65 go to zero - the company fails ‣ 25 return 1x to 5x - surviving but not thriving ‣ 9 return 5x to 10x - a successful investment ‣ 1 returns 10x+ - the unicorns Assuming a $500k investment in each: ‣ $32.5m down the drain ‣ $12.5m invested, $31.3m returned = $18.8m up ‣ $4.5m invested, $33.8m returned = $29.3m up ‣ ??? Without the unicorn, the fund is up $15.6m. Seems like a lot but the time horizon is 10 years, once you take out management fees, it is a tiny annual return on $50m. But that 1 unicorn can return $50m and that's what they're banking on. 💰 How The Funds Profit Funds typically charge investors a 2% annual management fee for invested capital. The VC invests that $50m across 100 businesses, they will charge investors $1 million a year to manage it. Over the 10 year investment period thats $10 million. They use this to pay employee salaries & overheads. They also take 20% of the returns, known as carry. The VC will make 20% of any profitable exit. On that unicorn, they will make $10m on the $50m exit. This goes to General Partners (GPs) of the firm. --- Using the Uber example - Benchmark Capital invested $12m in 2011*. Their fund size was $425m. By the time of the Uber IPO, Benchmark's stake was valued at approximately $7 billion. Benchmark charges investors a 30% carry fee. If the rest of Benchmark's investment's failed (they didn't) they still would have made $2.1 billion in carry fees. *there were subsequent investments though the amounts have not been disclosed.

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Many founders proudly claim to speak to every candidate they hire until the company is 100+ employees, but I've decided against that. We've now hired multiple great people that I haven't spoke to before we extended an offer. There are two main reasons: trust and speed. I believe in our team to make good decisions and this is one of the ultimate examples- who constitutes Chameleon. And with my hectic calendar I don't want to bottleneck decision making because speed is crucial to closing the best people. But I do speak to everyone either before or on Day 1. Along with my co-founder Brian we spend 20 mins reinforcing some key aspects of our culture and ways of working to help all new hires understand their expectations. We talk about some basics: the importance of Kaizen; how everything is a work-in-progress; how to avoid Slack from becoming a hindrance to work; how we hate "facetime" expectations etc. Maintaining the right culture requires this kind of non-scaleble and individual-level engagement and coaching, alongside systems and processes. Would be interested to know what tactical things other founders and leaders to do maintain culture as the team grows!

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Early-stage Founders. When it comes to hiring - where you're not investing time, you're wasting money. Across my career, I’ve seen consistent themes resulting in hiring going wrong. One of the most prevalent of these is not enough time being invested in setting hiring up for success from the start. When the stakes are so high to get it right, investing even just a couple of hours into planning in these areas upfront, will pay dividends later on. Create unmistakable clarity over what you're hiring for: Invest time crafting your role, and ideal candidate profiles. Don’t waste time interviewing without a clear view of the traits, experience and skills you need. Define the desired outputs and goals this hire will achieve, work backwards, and ensure the entire interviewing panel knows exactly what they’re looking for too. Translate this into the job description: Underestimating the impact of a good JD is a rookie error. If you’re not investing time in writing a good JD because you think people don’t read them - imagine how many you’ll miss that’ll read it and won’t apply at all. Talk to your ideal candidate. Tell them who you are, what they’ll do here, and how much impact this role will have. This is the beginning of your employer brand and often a candidate’s first experience interacting with your company. Be proud you’re hiring, entice top talent, and excite them enough to apply. Design, define and assign: From whose posting the ad, to sending the offer. Know who in your team owns what tasks. De-disk dropping the ball, a messy candidate experience and candidate dropouts. Invest time in designing an interview plan that will only build the excitement of joining your company. Define what needs to be assessed at each stage, and assign the best in your team to assess exactly that. Create a magical experience from offer to onboard: I once pulled out of an offer I’d already accepted because of a terrible post-offer experience. Onboarding starts from the moment they’ve accepted the offer and ends once they’ve passed their probation - and even arguably, well beyond that. Invest time in your new hires, check in with them often before they start, set them up for success in their first few weeks with assigned hands-on support to welcome them into your team. Mis-hiring is expensive, loosing new hires before they’ve even started is expensive. You’re bound to make mistakes along the way, but investing your time in setting up hiring for success de-risks your journey, and will save you more than the costs associated with starting again!

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Flattered... We have had an incredible number of people register to join EmergeOne recently and it just goes to show how well known we have become supporting venture backed tech startups with fractional CFOs. But... Having been through the applications, we've already rejected over 50% of them off hand. And no doubt we will reduce that further. Why? We are relentlessly, obsessively, unrepentently focussed on quality - I learned very early on in my life that it is better to compete on strong quality differentiation than racing to the bottom on price. But more importantly than this, we want to provide our clients with absolutely the very best CFO support they can get in the UK today. We want to be the people they rely on, trust and who they would refer on to others without thinking twice. So what is it that we <actually> look for in a great CFO? They hold a qualification that makes sense. ↳ This might be a designation like CA, CIMA, ACCA or FCA - someone that has been through the hard yards of qualifying so that we know they can actually do the numbers work. They have worked with VC backed businesses for min the last 5 years. ↳ Being an FD in an SME manufacturing business is NOTHING like working in a fast growth VC backed business. The ability to see around corners, expect the unexpected and know what and when to prioritise is critical. They have raised funds from institutional investors. ↳ If you don't know what it means to raise a VC round, interogate a term sheet, understand the difference between economics and control and what and when to cede ground versus when to hold it, you're not CFO for VC backed businesses. They can build a financial model in their sleep. ↳ Most of the CFOs that work with EmergeOne can model out any business scenario. But it's not where their value lies - though it may be the starting point. They don't hard code numbers or neglect to build a dynamic model. They know how to think through and build out assumptions based on the BUSINESS, not based on a template. They are fractional by default. ↳ We've seen a tonne of people flood the fractional market thinking it's either a good way to earn or maybe as a stepping stone into a full time role. We don't want these sorts of people. We want folk that live the fractional life because they enjoy the diversity of businesses they work with, can context switch between them and are curious by nature. They can be trusted. ↳ Whilst hard to 'test' for, the most important element throughout all of this is that they can be trusted. By our clients, by investors, by colleagues, by the boards they report into and - importantly - by me and the rest of the EmergeOne team. We are nothing without that trust. And because of all of this, our clients, their investors and their boards DO trust us to take care of their finances. We're not playing a short term volume game, we're here to stay. Which means never compromising on what we do, and who we do it with.

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CEO’s/CRO’s of VC backed SaaS start-ups, looking to scale quickly, often ask my advice on what a good interview process looks like. The answer - The businesses most successful at scaling quickly, have a repeatable and structured format to each interview stage. Unstructured interviews can seem useful. Informal conversation can help build rapport, it’s less clinical and allows the individual to shine through. They clearly have a place in more individual hires, however when looking to scale quickly, this can lead to: ❌ The candidate experience can vary greatly depending on who they speak with and if the interviewer has prepared effectively or not. ❌ Increased subjectivity and reliance on interviewers’ judgement. ❌ Inconsistency between interviews can introduce bias and make it difficult to compare With a more structured approach: ✔ Objective comparison: easy to compare candidates responses directly against each other ✔ Clarity: The interviewing team is clear on what is to be expected and therefore the candidate experience should be more positive. ✔ Fairness: Every candidate is asked the same set of questions, gets the same interview experience and the same chance to perform. Just because the meeting is structured, it doesn’t mean it needs to be overly clinical or lack dynamism. However a repeatable and scalable process is key if a businesses is committed to fast and effective growth. 📧 [email protected] 📲LinkedIn Message 📞 07957449539

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🎬 Causal Offsite montage video just dropped, featuring sunny Sussex, UK 🇬🇧 The cost was $1,500 per person (incl. flights/transport). Here's the cost breakdown + why I think in-person offsites are well worth the money for remote companies: 🛫 Transportation: $600 (flights/trains) 🛏️ Accommodation: $500 (4 nights) 🍽️ Meals: $400 These numbers are averages — half of our team flew in from the US, so their travel costs were higher than folks getting a train from London. Keeping the location local to a big chunk of the team helped save on travel, and the UK countryside is stunning! As a remote team, in-person off-sites have great ROI for us: 1️⃣ Relationships: we spend more time at work than we do with our families/friends, so having real human relationships with colleagues makes that time a lot more fun + meaningful. 2️⃣ Collaboration: solving the big, open-ended problems is what changes the trajectory of the business, but it's hard to do this over time-boxed Zoom calls. Brainstorming and problem-solving in-person is way more effective. 3️⃣ Serendipity: being together for a few days with unstructured time sparks ideas and conversations that would never happen on Slack. Some of our best product ideas have started out as a random conversation at an off-site. If you've organised a company off-site, I'd love to hear how you approach it + how much it costs — let me know in the comments!

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