Understanding your first C-suite hires as a growing SME
Your SME is growing and it’s time to consider building out a full, strategic C-suite. But which role should you look to fill first? What skills and knowledge do you need from someone coming into a growth SME environment to help you go after growth?
From your COO to your CPO, to considering when it’s time to move on from holding the mantle of Managing Director yourself, here’s what you need to look for in your C-suite hires to help your SME grow sustainably.
Your first C-Suite hire: The Chief Operating Officer
It often makes sense to start by bringing in a COO to sit alongside you and any other senior leaders that have helped you grow the business so far. One sign that it’s time to bring in a COO is when you reach an operational bottleneck and your productivity is starting to suffer.
This is because it’s the COO’s job to get down into the weeds of the day-to-day business. It varies with the size and shape of the business, but a COO is the person who makes sure everything else can happen — that the technical team can do their best work, that marketing can perform, that finance is involved where they need to be. They're the glue that pulls everything together and ensures things run seamlessly.
It’s in a Chief Operating Officer’s job description to offer visible, day-to-day leadership and keep everything aligned to company goals. Their key focuses as they join your business will be:
operational excellence, such as whether processes are in place and being followed
coaching and developing others
holding a culture of accountability
driving continuous improvement and reviewing the customer experience
liaising with other teams like finance
and overseeing governance and compliance while your company isn't big enough to justify having this as a separate department
The real benefit for SME leaders who have so far been hands-on in everything their business does is knowing that their COO is taking things off their plate so they can focus on longer-term strategic goals. It makes perfect sense to bring this person in before a CPO or even a CFO to ensure everything is finely-tuned ready for these other senior hires to step into and run with.
Your team may be semi-built before your COO comes in to oversee it, but it takes a good COO to build out the team properly — making sure it's fit for purpose, profitable, and hired at a pace that matches actual growth, turnover, and invoicing.
The hire that secures your growth: The Chief People Officer
People make or break growth. Your CPO knows this and can help you bring in the top talent that’s the best fit for your business – that’s why they themselves are such a key hire.
A CPO is often hired slightly earlier in service businesses than in product businesses because, in a service business, your people are often closely linked to your offering. In fact, research shows that customer lifetime value depends on the staff you hire so investment in people and culture should be one of the biggest things you're looking at in your spend. A CPO with a clear remit can help you bring in the right people and embed the culture you want to see in your business. Sadly, too many growth SMEs wait too long to bring in a CPO and often only think to hire someone into this role after something people related has gone badly wrong.
Workforce planning is another of the core remits of a CPO. This can be complicated if you’re at a rapid stage of growth and attempting to handle these duties without expert help. If you handle these decisions poorly or lack the experience that a CPO brings with them, you can quickly create turnover and the wrong kind of reputation for your brand. But bring in a well-versed professional – especially one who brings stand-out people with them – and your new CPO can help the board or SLT make sensible strategic decisions while complying with the law.
How you retain and embed your company culture can make you the employer of choice in your sector. Your CPO will ensure this is done to the best standard, helping you retain the best talent and driving customer retention. They’ll work to give people access to professional development and grow their careers to help you retain them, encouraging loyalty that offers you an important return as you move on to new milestones.
Crucially for growth SMEs, you need to bring in a strong CPO who understands how culture changes as a company grows. You might want to look for someone who’s been involved in this kind of growth before and can talk to the impact of their own efforts in this work.
One thing you’ll want to hear them mention during the hiring process is internal communication. A CPO who has been through growth before will know that communication channels change as headcount grows.
They’ll know that there’s a tipping point once your headcount reaches 50. At this point, communication becomes far more complex simply because of the number of people, and you have to manage culture differently. A lot of companies get stuck hovering around the 50 mark for years but a strategic CPO hire will help you push through if that’s your goal.
The hire that builds demand: Chief Marketing Officer
The CMO is usually a later hire, one we tend to see earlier in product businesses where growth is driven by product development, innovation, and getting to market — if the product isn't good enough, nothing else matters.
When hiring your first CMO, you're looking for someone to set the marketing strategy in line with company objectives and values, get the branding and positioning right, and keep building demand and innovation so the product range keeps growing. Service-led businesses still need CMOs, but they tend to be less critical in the earlier stages of growth when strong sales hires may be capable of handling the lead generation and conversion.
And then there's the other big split — B2B versus B2C. Some companies may even blend B2B and B2C, which adds complexity — different tone, different strategies, category management, and so on. Your CMO will help define this, taking ownership of positioning and refining your marketing strategy to ensure you’re using the marketing mix correctly to pursue your goals.
They’ll also review the structure of the marketing team, considering which marketing specialisms you already have and what other talent they need to secure to deliver on the strategy. They’ll liaise with other senior leaders to ensure everyone is on message and that your product or service delivers on what the marketing promises, adjusting as needed.
The timing and task list for your first CMO hire really depends on your product or service mix, how complex it is, and what's actually going to drive growth. Is it niche product excellence, in which case you need that marketing head earlier? Or is it service, in which case the CMO might come slightly later in the C-suite build?
One way to understand whether you need a CMO or not is to understand your intended growth and to work backwards from your end goal so you get a clear picture of what you need to get there.
The role that replaces you: Managing Director
For many growth SMEs, the Managing Director title belongs to the founder or one of the partners who has been there from the very beginning. They’ve been involved in everything from sending email campaigns to networking, to building the product and naming the brand. They’ve worked hard to grow the C-suite around them.
As such, an MD hire usually happens because the founder or current MD needs to step out of operational delivery and into a Chair or CEO role, or into a more specialist position. This means hiring an MD is normally a backfill and the demands of the role are already better defined than some of the other C-suite roles we’ve discussed here.
Replacing yourself can be one of the hardest things to admit you need to do, but also one of the easiest roles to fill because you know exactly what the role needs to be. That said, personally replacing yourself as MD can lead to bias in the hiring process because you're seeing it through your own lens and expecting people to do exactly what you would do.
One of the most important things to do, therefore, is to have as objective a view as possible. You've obviously got to like the person, want to work with them, and know they embody the business's values but beyond that, to reduce bias before you even look at a CV or a referral, you need to be absolutely clear on the long-term intention of the hire. You need to think about not just what frees you up but what the organisation needs this person to do to move forward. It has to be bigger than your own intentions.
And that’s something that’s true for all of these C-suite roles - you have to be prepared to delegate authority not just tasks to make sure the value is created.
Hiring a c-suite in Bristol and the South West
So, how easy is it to hire at C-suite level here in Bristol and the South West?
Financial services and defence dominate the South West region, along with their subcontractors and supply chains and that has a knock-on effect on the kind of talent and experience found locally for c-suite hires.
However, due to our position along the M4/M5 interchange, we also have a strong cluster of FMCG businesses in e-commerce and logistics.
Bristol also has genuine strength in environmentally and sustainability-focused businesses, and there’s a good concentration of B Corp companies in the South West — it's quite normal here to be talking about being a B Corp, or working with one. We’re also lucky to have a founder-led community that genuinely cares about people and planet as well as profit.
This means purpose-led hiring is a huge trend for candidates at every level, including some very senior C-suite candidates who have chosen to leave London and move out to the West Country in search of opportunities with purpose-led organisations. These people want to know they're contributing to something good.
However, that also mean there's an expectation-management conversation needed early on in the hiring process around what that means for salary and package, especially since a hybrid role can tempt people back into commuting to London.
Overall, there are very talented people are choosing to be here and the business community in Bristol and the South West is strong – perfect if you’re a growth SME looking to secure some top talent.
Looking to make your first C-suite hires and hit your growth goals? We specialise in working with growth SMEs as they chase their ambitions, working as a long-term partner to set you up with the right people at the right time in your growth. Get in touchtoday to discuss your plans and how we can help you get there.