Startups don’t fail because they hire the wrong people. They fail because they hire too many before the system can support them.
That’s why your first scale hire shouldn’t be HR. It should be ops.
HR sets policies. Ops builds engines. If you’re under 30 people and already hunting for a Head of People, you might be solving the wrong problem. Culture matters. But cashflow, compliance, systems and speed — those are existential.
Early ops hires create leverage. They don’t just fill gaps. They prevent gaps from forming. They build the CRM stack, not just assign seats. They model headcount against burn. They connect finance, marketing, and product so people stop working in silos.
They’re your internal glue before you’re big enough for managers. And they make hiring cleaner when HR does arrive — because there’s process, visibility and actual data behind it.
An early Head of Ops can own the stuff that stalls growth: vendor onboarding, payment rails, customer handoffs, SLA tracking, board reporting. That’s what lets your commercial team scale without chaos. That’s what lets your engineers ship without guessing ticket priority.
HR, by contrast, tends to operate upstream: values, DEI frameworks, engagement. All important. But hard to scale without foundations in place. Great HR thrives in organised systems. Ops builds those systems.
This isn’t anti-HR. It’s sequencing. Hire HR too early, and they become office therapists and event planners. Hire ops first, and HR walks into a structure they can scale.
If your startup’s growing fast and things are already breaking, you don’t need culture slides. You need operational muscle.
Start there. HR will thank you later.
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