You just raised. Who do you hire first?
The round closing does not answer the hiring question, it makes it urgent and expensive to get wrong. These pages take the stage you are actually at and work through which seat the constraint dictates, what each one costs at one or two days a week, and the point at which the honest answer stops being fractional and becomes a permanent appointment.
The day rate bands quoted throughout come off live listings on the bench rather than a salary survey. The full rate card is published openly, as pages and as data.
Start from the stage you are at
What a board expects in the first quarter after a Series A, week by week: the reporting that starts now, the seats to fill, and what to leave alone.
Which four seats a seed company fills on the way to a Series A, the order the constraint dictates, and what each costs at one or two days a week.
The finance function a Series B board expects: the artefacts, the audit readiness, and the point where a fractional seat stops being the right shape.
The seven hiring mistakes that most often cost a funded company its next round, why each one is hard to see from inside, and what to do instead.
The rule underneath all four
The order is set by the constraint, not by seniority. The instinct after a raise is to fill the most senior missing box on the org chart, and the better question is which number the next round will be priced on and what is currently stopping it moving. A company that fills four planned seats while the real bottleneck stays blocked has spent the money and bought a better-looking org chart.
The second rule is that five days is not a measure of commitment. For several functions the work genuinely is two days a week, and buying five costs roughly three times as much once employer costs are counted, without producing more decisions. The cost calculator runs both sides with those costs included, and it will tell you when the full-time hire is the cheaper answer.
The seats a funded company usually reaches for
- The fractional CFO: what it costs and how to hire one
- The fractional CMO: what it costs and how to hire one
- The fractional CTO: what it costs and how to hire one
- The fractional COO: what it costs and how to hire one
- The fractional Sales Director: what it costs and how to hire one
- The fractional People Lead: what it costs and how to hire one
Common questions
Who should a company hire first after raising?
Whichever function is currently stopping the metric the next round will be priced on, which is often not the most senior missing title. The hiring plan in the deck was written before the money existed and before the quarter showed which part of the business is the actual bottleneck. Fill the constraint, and leave the other boxes empty until they hurt.
Is a fractional executive the right hire straight after a round?
For a seat where the work is decisions rather than daily management, usually yes, and it is the fastest way to find out how big the permanent role really is. For a function that already has a team needing managing every day, no: a part-time leader becomes a bottleneck, and the permanent search should start immediately with an interim holding the seat.
How long should a company wait before hiring after a raise?
Long enough to make the function's numbers visible, which is usually four to six weeks, and no longer. A senior hire who starts before there is any baseline cannot be assessed for two quarters. Deliberating past that point costs the quarter, which is its own expensive mistake.
Does raising a round mean salary bands should go up?
Only where the market has moved. A raise makes a company able to pay more rather than obliged to, and bands set at the top of the range in the first quarter propagate through every subsequent hire and review cycle. It is one of the few decisions here that is close to impossible to reverse.
Browse it yourself, or hand over the brief
Browse the bench and approach an operator directly at no cost. Operator Search runs it for you: three researched candidates against a written brief in five business days. And where the seat is genuinely full-time, retained search is priced on the page rather than quoted on a call.