Happy Sunday, Everyone!

I hope you’re all enjoying the final weekend of July (yes, really) - it’s hard to believe, but back-to-school sales are launching, NFL training camps are underway (including for the World Champion Philadelphia Eagles), and we’re already talking about 2026 plans with some clients (yikes!).

But, while it’s still summer, I wanted to talk about one other challenge that keeps coming up - whether it’s in conversations with CEOs/CMOs/COOs, or get-togethers with fellow agency executives, or even in pitch/investment meetings with startups: hiring.

Human capital - recruitment, mentorship, hiring, retention, management - accounts for the lion’s share of the internal meetings on my calendar. For context, our agency has grown from ~10 people to ~50 in the last 7 years. Hiring a net of ~6 people a year might not seem a Herculean challenge, but looking back, I can confidently say that younger Sam wildly under-estimated the difficulty in hiring great people, and massively over-estimated his own abilities as a recruiter/manager/leader. Between then and now, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time getting better at recruiting and hiring people - because I’ve realized that it’s one of the highest-leverage activities I can do. I subscribe to the belief that passion follows mastery, and while I am not delusional enough to think I’ve mastered anything HR-related, I do enjoy it much more today than I did before.

As for our agency, we review ~250 resumes for every 1 hire we make. We do all our own recruitment - unlike in years past, we no longer use recruiters (except in exceedingly rare cases where an outside person can bring outsized value).

Growing up, my grandfather always used to tell me, “You always pay to learn - the only thing that changes is how you pay. Time, money or pride.” Well - when it comes to hiring, I think I’ve paid a hefty sum in all three – and I hope I can help some of you avoid the same expensive lessons.

To lead into this issue, I wanted first to share my overarching philosophy on hiring/recruitment. It’s not one you’ll hear in a business school classroom, one that will make your CFO smile or one that immediately makes sense – but when I’ve stuck true to it, good things have followed. And when I’ve veered from it (usually because I was trying to be cute or clever), bad things have happened.

The philosophy itself has seven components:

1. If it isn’t a hell yes, it’s a hell no
2. Always hire at the ends
3. Cultural fit trumps talent
4. The team is more than the sum of its parts
5. Obsess about the intangibles + traits
6. Don’t double down on a losing hand
7. Actively overpay your best people
8. Be as good to people on the way out as you were on the way in

In reading them, you’re probably not sure what to make of this (other than I’m a bit weird) - so in each section that follows, I’ll break down why I think it’s important, what we look for and some ways you can test for it.

If It Isn’t A Hell Yes, It’s a Hell No

For me, hiring has always had a tension between the head and the gut.

There are candidates that - intellectually - I know I should like. If you’ve ever hired, you know what I’m talking about: they went to the right schools, they worked at the right places, they have the right experience, they’ve completed the right classes/certifications, they come with the right references, they even often have a “right” answers in the interview. These are the “dream” candidates that recruiters can’t wait to bring you and that most HR people are head-over-heels trying to extend offers to.

But after you’ve done all that - the phone screen, the interview, the second interview - something’s amiss. For all of the reasons you could or should like them, something feels off. That tension is almost indescribable. I’ve been in meetings with our COO after an interview that, by any objective measure, went well – and I can’t say “yes” to bringing the person on board. Many times, when I’m asked why, I’m not able to articulate a satisfactory answer, other than “the gut says something’s wrong.”

And on the flip side, we’ve had interviews with candidates that checked none of the typical boxes you’d assume a buttoned-up, well-regarded, award-winning agency would look at – and I can’t wait to hire them.

That’s the tension. And too often, earlier in my career, I’d try to rationalize away the lingering doubts. I’d lean into the intellectual part and ignore the gut. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well. Multiple times (not proud of that - there are few things I loathe more than making the same mistake twice).

The lesson that I’ve taken from this is simple: if it isn’t a hell yes, it’s a hell no.

It’s a simple razor that avoids the rationalization trap. It has saved me from making a bad decision more than a few times.

While it may seem both blunt and brutal, there’s an economic case just beneath the surface.

In making those mistakes above, I learned a valuable lesson: the cost of a bad hire is (almost always) greater than the cost of not hiring at all. Bad hires are staggeringly expensive. It isn’t just the money you’ve paid them (which is often substantial) - that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Lingering under the water line, there’s the hiring cost (all that time spent on recruiting, interviewing, negotiating the compensation, recruiter fees if applicable, etc.); there’s the opportunity cost (those other exceptional candidates you passed on to hire the dud - they’ve either moved on OR know they weren’t your first choice); there’s the potential reputational damage; there’s the opportunity cost in performance (how well would those ad accounts have performed if the hire was exceptional); there’s the time/money/energy that went into onboarding and training the bad hire; there’s the time/money/energy that then needed to be expended to clean up the mistakes made by the bad hire; there’s the time/money/energy required to document said mistakes, implement the personal improvement plan (“PIP”), monitor progress and, if necessary, move on; and last (but certainly not least), there’s the tax on the rest of the team and the hit to both culture + morale while all of this is going on.

Sum it all up, and it isn’t an exaggeration to say that a bad hire can be a million-dollar mistake - and that’s assuming you aren’t dragged into a legal dispute/lawsuit.

Put another way, the downside of a bad hire is often orders of magnitude greater than most hiring managers, executives and leaders believe – which is why they’re often willing to go with their head over their gut.

When you believe the total downside risk of a bad hire is $25,000 (“We’ll hire them at $80,000/year (+ fringe + benefits), give them 3 months and see…”), and you think the upside is massive (our delusions of human potential are near-limitless), it isn’t difficult to see how many leaders end up ignoring their gut in favor of their head.

In contrast, the “hell yes or hell no” philosophy comes from an assumption that the downside of a single bad hire is near-existential to the business. When you have that frame - that a single bad hire could cost you your job or your business - you understand why even the slightest twinge in the gut is enough of a reason to not move forward with a candidate.

That’s the lesson I had to learn - in hiring, the stakes are too high and the margin for error is too low. So, when you’re in that room (or on that Zoom), and your head says yes and your heart/gut says no - I hope this rule pops into your head. If it isn’t a hell yes, it’s a hell no. Always.

Of course, knowing who to hire is only part of the challenge. Equally important is knowing where on the talent spectrum to focus your efforts – which brings me to principle #2.

Always Hire At The Ends

This one is going to be controversial.

Imagine a continuum of skill, from (essentially) zero hard skills on one end to absolute mastery of a particular set of skills on the other. In between, there’s people who have some skill, some who have topped out, some who just haven’t hit mastery yet and some who have enough knowledge/training to be dangerous. You can probably see where this is going.

I hire at the ends of that continuum.

The best illustration for why comes from professional sports (and my Madden 2001 days). Back when I was in elementary school, I got a PS2 and Madden 2001 for Christmas. I spent days on end playing franchise mode (probably not healthy in retrospect, but the jury’s still out on the value of the lessons learned), trying to win the 2002 Superbowl AND transform my beloved Eagles into a dynasty. The problem I ran into, over and over again, was that if I pushed in all the chips and over invested in mid-level talent to try to get over the hump and win the 2002 SB, I ended up with an expensive (and quite bad) team in the subsequent years; in contrast, if I was patient, invested in good young talent, and developed them well, I got obliterated in 2002 but was able to build a cost-effective core that could serve as the foundation of a dynasty. And if I tried to thread the needle - bring on just enough high-priced, middle-of-the-road veterans to compete and keep the young talent around - the inevitable result was mediocrity. Too good to draft high, too bad to have a realistic shot at the SB.

The middle was death. That was a HARD lesson for 3rd grade me to swallow.

Now, running a company is not quite the same as playing Madden - but there are some parallels that make that lesson quite applicable.

The first is that when you hire someone in the middle, they come unfinished – there are things they know, things they don’t; good habits and bad habits. And, due to their lack of mastery, they don’t have a reliable way to parse the difference. The end result is that the hires in the middle come with more risk and require more effort – because you first have to identify the bad habits, then invest more time helping them un-learn those bad habits, and only then can you get to the point where you can start building them toward mastery. All the while, they’re more expensive - and less productive - than some of the more junior people who didn’t have the handicap of latent bad habits.

That’s why the Madden lesson stuck with me: the middle is where you lose - slowly, expensively and without realizing it until it’s too late. When you invest in the ends of the continuum - the rookies or the masters - you either build for the future and you win now. When you hire in the middle, you do neither.

We bring in a lot of junior people. Not because we want to pay them less (we don’t - and we promote + give raises to our best junior people within months of being hired), but because we want to train them well. We’re in every relationship for the long game. We want to develop world-class marketers - the kind who can think big while remaining brilliant at the basics, who can be in the ad accounts and understand that most of what happens in that ad account is a result of what’s going on outside it; who can be in front of clients and behind a keyboard and in a creative session all in the same day. The best way to get that person is to develop them in an environment where that’s the norm.

The thing I’ve found, over and over again, is that junior talent that’s surrounded by smart, generous people will level up fast. We give them reps. We give them ownership. We give them exposure. There’s no “wait your turn” culture. If you can hang (and honestly, even before you can), you’re in the room. You’re not making the decisions, but you’re there - on our dime.

On the other side, we also stack our team with all-world talents, too. Our senior team is as good as any agency’s for our size. We’re intentional about hiring the best of the best - people who come from diverse backgrounds (in house, at big agencies, at small agencies, entrepreneurs, former big-brand marketers, etc.) who bring both the experience and expertise that comes from doing a thing over and over and still being excited, curious and eager to do it again.

Hiring those people is exceptionally difficult - and exceptionally expensive - but it’s worth it.

I think most marketers (and most agency owners) underappreciate the impact a true all-world talent can have on their team. The difference between an elite media buyer or creative strategist or web developer and a mediocre one isn’t linear; it’s exponential. In the software world, there are “10x engineers” – the people who have a combination of expertise, systems thinking and technical excellence that allows them to have 10x the impact of a run-of-the-mill engineer. The same concept applies to marketers. A single elite talent, in the right environment, will elevate an entire team. They’ll find solutions most of the people in the middle would have never considered. They’ll build systems that avoid entire classes of problems. They’ll build shit that just works, and they won’t stop until it accomplishes the goal.

Not only are those people AWESOME to have on your team (and clients certainly love working with all-stars), they’re fantastic role models for our junior people.

So, when given the choice, I almost always hire at one end or the other - the middle is death.

Cultural Fit Trumps Talent

If the above point is about nature (skill levels + such), this one is about nurture.

When I was younger, I used to think culture was a buzzword thrown around by the higher-ups as this amorphous thing that didn’t actually matter. To me, what mattered was talent - if you were good, you were good – and that’s that. Culture was just the thing that the people who couldn’t hang yammered on about.

Turns out, younger me was wrong (again). Aside: I’m genuinely not looking forward to re-reading this article in 10 years to figure out just how wrong this iteration of Sam was about these things.

As I’ve gotten older (and, several people have reminded me, my hair grayer), I’ve come to realize that the above dramatically under-appreciates the impact and importance of culture. Culture isn’t a buzzword; it’s the air you breathe, the water you drink; the environment itself. Yes, it’s amorphous, hard-to-describe and near-impossible to quantify, but just as we all know (and feel) when the air is smokey or the water is contaminated, we know when the culture is off. We feel when the culture is off.

If you accept this metaphor - that culture is akin to the environment itself - then this component of my philosophy becomes much easier to understand. Just as a fantastic seed or a majestic tree planted in toxic soil will wither and die, so too will high-potential juniors or world-class talents. Likewise, even a minuscule amount of toxins can turn otherwise healthy soil toxic; just a few drops of a contaminant can render water non-potable. The same is true for culture - it doesn’t take much toxicity to turn a healthy, fun, vibrant, nourishing culture into a toxic one.

This brings me to my hiring points: (1) if you’re not sure what your organization culture is, figure that out before you hire; (2) once you’ve clarified your culture, make it the central litmus test for your hiring.

There have been situations in my career where we had the opportunity to hire incredible talents who were not cultural fits. The only hiring regrets I have are a direct result of overlooking cultural fit, especially in cases where someone had exceptional talent. De-toxing a culture is time-consuming and expensive (not just financially, but emotionally). Save yourself the hefty clean-up bill and prioritize your culture above all else. If someone isn’t a cultural fit, it’s a hell no.

The Team Must Be More Than The Sum of the Parts

For a not-insignificant portion of my career, I operated under the premise that stacking talent (preferably talent that fit our culture) was the way to build a remarkable team. Put 5 LeBrons on the court and you’re probably not going to lose many games (unless it’s the NBA finals), right?

Wrong.

The best teams aren’t just a collection of superstars. They have world-class role players - the players who elevate everyone around them. They have players who share the floor without ego, who create space for each other’s strengths to shine and whose combined impact is greater than the sum of their individual skill sets.

To (once again) reference Madden, I learned the hard way that a roster full of high-priced “stars” with overlapping strengths doesn’t guarantee success (if fact, it often leads to first round exits - something Jerry Jones & the Dallas Cowboys still haven’t figured out). You still need a coherent system: the right mix of rookies you can develop, veterans who bring leadership and instincts, and a few true difference-makers (the 10x players) who elevate everyone. Without that balance, the team becomes a collection of disconnected parts.

This is as true (if not more true) in agencies or marketing departments as it is in pro sports. You need people who can play defined roles - a person who thrives in the trenches of ad accounts & media buying, someone who can create remarkable post-click experiences; someone who can develop scroll-stopping creative, a remarkable account lead who can keep everyone working toward the same goal and that rare “star” who can take that team to the next level. But here’s the trick: those roles can’t be static. We don’t just want people who stay in their lane; we want people who can grow into well-rounded marketers, capable of both big-picture strategic thinking and tactical execution.

There’s no perfect formula for this, other than to say: don’t just chase stars. Hire the people who are great fits for your team and your culture. Hire the people who want to work at your agency/company, not who you have to convince – because those are the people who will voluntarily adapt how they play to the system you want to run. The best litmus test is to ask what they’d do if someone on the team is better at their core skill than they are. In my experience, the people that you want - the people who will make great teammates and elevate everyone around them - are the ones who respond with some variation of, “If someone is better, then I’m going to do whatever I can to help them become even better.”

An unselfish, team-first mindset is a wildly difficult thing to instill in someone; it’s easier to just hire the people who already have it. And yes, I’ve found it is disproportionately present in people who either were relatively high-level athletes OR worked in the service industry. You might say people in those industries tend to have certain traits that correlate with good hires.

Obsess About the Intangibles + Traits

We get a lot of resumes from people who have worked at big/hot/sexy brands (yes, I know this sounds like an OnlyFans promo). Earlier in my career, I’d over-index toward those candidates. My logic was that if you worked for [insert big brand / well-known company / hot startup here], then you know what you’re doing. You’ve managed millions of dollars in media. You’ve done massive influencer programs. You’ve built super-stupendous websites. Whatever.

Now (and looking back), the persistently difficult thing about those candidates is determining whether they were the pilot or commander of that rocket ship, or merely the passenger. The logos on your resume tell me where you’ve been; the nice little blurbs tell me what you think you accomplished - but none of it tells me anything about what you actually did while you were there (and, thanks to our overly-litigious society, odds are your former employers won’t tell me a damn thing when I call, either).

My solution to this problem was the same as my solution to any other marketing measurement problem: find the predictive proxy metrics + optimize for those. When it comes to hiring, we don’t have metrics - but we do have traits. I’ve narrowed it down to eight core traits:

1. Curiosity: This one is non-negotiable for me. If someone isn’t deeply curious, they’re not going to make it. Marketing + advertising is a dynamic game where the rules are constantly changing. To be successful, you need to ask questions. To investigate. To dig for answers. I want the person who sees something weird - a trend, an anomaly, a weird behavior - says, “Wait, why is that happening?” and refuses to give up until they’ve found a sufficient answer.
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   Give me someone who asks questions like the above regularly, and I’ll show you a person who will out-think and out-grow a candidate with a perfect resume. Put another way: experience without curiosity leads to stagnation; curiosity without experience leads to exponential growth.
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2. Accountability: I’m a huge proponent of accountability for both the work and the outcome. No matter what client/industry/campaign/platform, there are always outside factors that can be blamed – the economy, Meta being broken, the algorithm, the competition, whatever. That’s not interesting. I want people who, in the face of all those potential targets for blame, choose to look in the mirror and ask, “What could I have done differently to create a better result?”
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   I grew up watching the end of Michael Jordan’s era and the entirety of Kobe’s run - and the thing that stood out to me in watching both of them was their focus on accountability. Whenever something didn’t go as planned, Kobe was in the gym the next day, working on that thing - whatever it was. When a teammate made a mistake, both Kobe & MJ were there, working with them to fix it. And never - not once - did I hear either of them blame others for a loss or a mistake. The buck stopped there. I’m sure that rubbed some people the wrong way - but it created a winning culture.
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   That’s what I look for in hiring. Unlike sports, marketing is much more of a grey area - the difference between a win and loss is rarely as obvious as a basketball scoreboard. That makes the importance of accountability even greater. I want the people who will raise their hand when something isn’t working, then roll up their sleeves to fix it. I want the person who owns the mistake, then gets to work making it right.
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   The great thing about accountability is that it’s easy (albeit uncomfortable) to test: just find something the candidate did wrong, and ask them about it. It should be something relatively trivial (why were you a few minutes late, why didn’t you have a resume printed, why didn’t you send a thank-you note, whatever). Observe the response. Someone who embraces accountability will own it, then either make it right or make sure it doesn’t happen again; someone who doesn’t will blame something else.
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   To all of the people who say that’s not a fair way of looking at it (and yes, things happen) - I don’t care. We’re in the results business. Excuses are contagious. You want to hire the people who look in the mirror, not out the window, when things go wrong.
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3. Results-Driven: Marketing is a results business, not an activity business. I want people who are relentlessly focused on creating outcomes that help our clients grow and achieve their goals, not the people who celebrate effort alone. My overarching philosophy is that I work very hard at being lazy (similar to Bill Gates’ comment that he often gives the most challenging problems to his laziest engineers) and I don’t care much for time-in-seat. Instead, I obsess over outcomes - the litmus test is if the thing they did worked, and if it didn’t, are they both curious as to why and accountable for it?
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4. Relentless: Before I get cancelled for writing this: no, “relentless” does not mean 24/7 hustle culture. That’s just internet hustle porn stupidity. Relentless is refusing to settle when something is merely good enough. It’s someone who sees a campaign performing at a 3.5x and asks, “How can we get to 4.0x?” It’s the person who celebrates a record month/quarter/year for a client, then is back the next day asking how we can set another record.
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5. Collaborative + Team-Oriented: I’m a proponent of Scott Galloway’s saying that greatness is in the agency of others. Marketing (and most of business) is a team sport, not a solo act. I’ve seen brilliant individuals wreck teams because they couldn’t share the floor or play without the ball.
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   There’s a persistent myth - especially in the agency world - that “collaboration” is code for “agreeable” – which I think is BS. Collaboration isn’t about agreeing at all costs; it’s about creating an environment where ideas can be exchanged and debated, but when a winner emerges, everyone gets on board.
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6. Caring: This sounds soft, but it’s anything but. I want people who care. Who give a damn. Who want to get to know their clients on a personal + professional level. Who want to have relationships with their colleagues. Who are invested in the success of our team + our clients.
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   Ultimately, if you don’t care - about your team members, about our clients, about your own work - you’re done. Caring is the difference between phoning it in (or doing “good enough” work) and being genuinely invested in the outcome. Every great team member or hire I’ve made has acted like an owner - they care. Deeply. Genuinely. Personally. Passionately. They don’t just clock in and clock out or check things off a list; they give a damn. They go out of their way to check on teammates. They send a considerate note or thoughtful gift to a client, just because they learned the client had a tough day or their kid got rejected from their dream school. They build true personal relationships.
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7. Attention To Detail: Related to caring - attention to detail is a trait I wished was discussed more in the marketing world. For anyone who has ever managed a campaign (traditional, digital, whatever), you know that a single wrong digit in a budget or a broken link in a landing page is the difference between a successful campaign and a viking funeral for your ad budget. The best people I’ve worked with have an almost obsessive eye for detail - they catch the small things that most people miss because they understand those “small” things can have huge downstream consequences.
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   This isn’t about perfectionism (and heaven knows I’m not a perfectionist); it’s about caring enough to sweat the details when it matters. Whether it’s QA-ing ad copy, checking UTMs or spotting inconsistencies in messaging, people with great attention to detail ensure that the work we’re putting out is as close to perfect as humanly possible. We’re still going to make mistakes (that’s what accountability is for!) - but we don’t have to make unforced errors.
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8. Holistic + Integrated Thinking: The final trait I look for is the ability to see the entire chessboard. Too many people only see the move directly in front of them - I don’t need someone who says, “I just bought the ads - the landing page is someone else’s job.”
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   The reality is that marketing is about systems, not silos. The media buyer who understands brand, creative, customer psychology, pricing strategy and post-click experiences? That’s someone who can have a transformational impact on a client (and the person I want on our team!).
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   I want people who can zoom out and think about how all the pieces work together: creative, media, data, pricing, retention. If you can’t see the full board, you’ll always be reacting instead of playing offense. The only way I’ve reliably found to screen for holistic thinking is to scenario-play during interviews – set up a case (i.e. give them anonymized data and a general scenario), then ask questions. See how they react. Find out how they think. Can they zoom out and ask big picture questions? Can they zoom in on specific inconsistencies or areas of opportunity? Are they comfortable asking questions beyond their core area of competence?

The people who possess these traits are the people that you’ll never have to ask what they think (they’ll tell you). You never have to assign them tasks (they’ll already be thinking about them + doing them). You never have to remind them about the goals (they have them taped to the wall).

Don’t Double Down on a Losing Hand

If there’s one mistake I’ve made in hiring that I regret the most, it’s doubling down on a losing hand. We’ve made hires that - for whatever reason - didn’t pan out. It was obvious there was a disconnect within the first week. Instead of being proactive about addressing it, I let it go - operating under the assumption that it would resolve itself, that some people just take longer to acclimate, that I didn’t know the whole story, whatever.

It was a mistake. Plain and simple.

Before you jump to conclusions, no, I’m not advocating you fire a new hire after a week. I am advocating that if you feel a new hire isn’t “getting it” - if the gut says something’s off - don’t wait. Have the conversation. Be open and supportive. Help them get their (proverbial) sea legs. Be a resource. Give them concrete milestones to achieve (be specific. We expect you to be able to do X, Y & Z by this date, and here’s what that entails….”)

If, after doing that, and giving them a reasonable amount of time, the issue persists, then move on. Do not allow people who are not good fits - talent-wise, culturally, interpersonally, whatever - to remain on the team. If there’s anything I’ve learned from working with world-class talents, it’s that they cannot stand being forced to carry someone who isn’t up to the challenge. When you keep under-performers around - when you double down on losing hands - that’s what you’re doing.

You’re sacrificing a winner (you’re best performers) to double down on a loser (the person who has refused or failed to improve despite being given clear, legitimate and genuine guidance on how to do so). That’s a shitty strategy and a shittier thing to do to your best people. Also - none of this is personal. The hire that’s not working out is probably a perfectly wonderful person who will be perfectly fine (or better) in a different culture/environment/situation. That’s OK. Not everyone is a fit everywhere, and you will do more harm than good if you try to modify your team/culture/situation to accommodate someone who isn’t working out instead of staying true to your culture and moving on.

Don’t sell your winners (your best people) to fund your losers (the bad hires). When you miss on a hire (and you will miss), identify and accept it quickly, proceed to the last principle, then take accountability for the miss and learn from it. Don’t let a bad hire linger for 3/6/9/12 months. The only thing worse than being wrong about a hire is being wrong about the hire AND your decision to keep them around.

Actively Overpay Your Best People

This is the simplest (and the shortest) one in this entire newsletter: pay your best people exceptionally well. I’ve been able to hire phenomenal people - true “A+” talents and even better people - because their former employers tried to get cute or lowball them. Don’t do that. The cost of losing a phenomenal talent is always greater than you think. One “A” player can outproduce 3-5 average people. You’re not saving money by nickel-and-diming them on a 10% raise; you’re inviting someone (like me) to come in and hire them from you - and the cost you’ll pay to replace them is staggering.

Overpaying your best people isn’t just about the dollars-and-cents compensation; it’s a message that you recognize and value their contribution. My advice to anyone who does hiring is to take a page out of Howie Roseman’s book (or Sam circa-Madden 2021): don’t wait for them to come to you for a raise - give it to them. Volunteer it. Re-sign them (so to speak) BEFORE they are free agents. The upfront loss you take is more than outweighed by the good will and long-term savings you’ll generate by doing it.

It’s good business. It’s good team management. It’s the right thing to do.

Be As Good To People On The Way Out As You Were On The Way In

One of the easiest traps to fall into as a leader is treating people like assets when they’re contributing and like liabilities when they’re leaving. It’s a mistake I’ve made - and one I think anyone who has been around hiring for any sufficient length of time has made.

It’s short-sighted. It’s a culture-killer.

The reality is that almost everyone will leave eventually. People change. Careers evolve. Life happens. New opportunities arise. How you handle that moment says more about your leadership than how you treated them on day one.

It’s easy to feel betrayed or frustrated or hurt that someone you found, recruited, mentored and developed is now going somewhere else. I’ve been there. I’ve had a few that have really, truly sucked. After one, a dear friend told me something to the effect of, “there’s a season for everything - for people to join, for people to move on, for people to stay, for people to grow. You can either be sad or angry that the season has changed, or you can celebrate what was and look forward to what is to come. The change is happening either way, and the only thing that matters is how you choose to react.”

That said, not every relationship ends on a high note. Sometimes you hire someone who isn’t the right fit or who can’t/won’t deliver at the level the team needs. In those cases, parting ways isn’t just inevitable, it’s necessary for both your organization and that person (that second part is something most people don’t realize - you aren’t doing the team member any favors by keeping them in a situation you know isn’t tenable or viable long-term). But even in those situations (and I’ve been in a few), you can stay true to this principle. You can give them a legitimate chance to address the issues. You can be direct, honest and kind. You can fire someone without humiliating them, without trashing them behind closed doors and without turning an unfortunate situation into a bitter one.

When someone exits - whether on their own terms or not - they should walk away with the same level of respect and clarity they had when they joined. It doesn’t mean you celebrate mediocrity, but it does mean you acknowledge the value they brought while they were here and give them the opportunity to part with dignity.

This isn’t just theoretical, either - there’s real practical value to heeding this advice. Your alumni network is as powerful as your current team. People talk. Former employees become clients, partners, referrers or critics - the choice is yours. When you’re good to people on the way out, even when the exit is difficult, you not only honor the work they’ve done, you protect the reputation of your company and your culture. This is one of those things that’s easier said than done. I’ve failed at it multiple times. It’s always a tough situation, but it can be made better if you truly internalize this point.

Looking back, every lesson I’ve learned about hiring came with a hefty price tag (money, time & pride).

If there’s a single thread that runs through these seven principles, it’s this: hiring is the highest-leverage decision you make as a leader. Every person you bring on either compounds value or quietly undermines it.

What I’ve learned is that hiring isn’t just about filling seats or finding people who can “do the job.” It’s about building a culture, a team and a foundation that gets stronger with every new addition. The wrong hire can take years to fix; the right hire can catapult your business (or your client’s business) forward by years.

These principles are more like the Pirates Code from Pirates of the Caribbean: they’re more like guidelines. If they save one of you from even one bad hire, the hours spent writing this issue will have been worth it. At the end of the day, the people you hire become your company. Get it right, and the work, the culture, and the results will take care of themselves.

Next week, we’re back to talking about ad accounts + marketing!

Cheers,

Sam

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