The most expensive mistakes I have made in business were not bad deals or missed markets. They were hiring the wrong person too early. I am Howard Davner, and across 25 years in capital markets and now as CEO of Beverage USA Holdings and co-founder of NERD Focus, I have come to believe one thing about building a company: the first ten people you bring on will decide what it becomes, long before any strategy does.
Early hires set the standard, not just the workload
When a company is small, there is no thick layer of process to absorb a weak hire. Each person is a large fraction of the whole, so each person is effectively writing the rulebook by example. The pace they keep becomes the company's pace. The quality they accept becomes the company's floor. The way they treat a customer or a colleague on a bad day becomes the norm everyone else calibrates to. You are not filling a seat; you are casting a founder of the culture.
Why I hire slow
Hiring slow does not mean hiring timidly. It means refusing to trade the standard for speed when I am under pressure to fill a gap. A vacancy feels urgent, and urgency tempts you to lower the bar for the first plausible candidate. But an average hire made in a hurry is far more costly than a role that stays open a few extra weeks. Once someone is inside a small team, their habits spread, and undoing that is slow, awkward, and demoralizing for everyone who was doing it right.
What I actually look for
Two things I weight heavily are ownership and evidence. Ownership is whether a person treats a problem as theirs to solve or as someone else's to escalate. It is the difference between "that is not my job" and "I noticed this and here is what I did." Evidence is exactly what it sounds like: not a polished claim about being a hard worker, but something they have actually built, shipped, or fixed. This is the same conviction behind Provieo, the platform I founded to help people demonstrate real, job-relevant work instead of relying on a résumé. In my own hiring, I would rather see one real thing someone made than a page of impressive-sounding history.
The discipline of the open seat
The hardest part of hiring slow is tolerating the empty chair. Work piles up, and the temptation to end the discomfort with a quick yes is real. I have learned to sit with it. An open role costs you effort now; the wrong hire costs you culture, momentum, and often the people you most wanted to keep. When the right person finally arrives, you feel the difference immediately, and so does everyone around them.
Build the core, then scale
Once you have a strong early core, hiring gets easier, because good people attract good people and the standard defends itself. That is the compounding payoff of patience at the start. My advice to any founder is simple: protect the first ten seats like they are the whole company, because in every way that matters, they are. Get those right, and almost everything downstream gets easier. Get them wrong, and no strategy will save you from the culture you accidentally built.
Learn more: provieo.com
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