--- title: You've Hired Someone Who's Done It Before description: You hire the VP from the company a hundred times your size, and for a few weeks everyone feels a little safer. There's a grown-up in the room now. image: https://centered.work/hubfs/26-09-09%20-%20Your%20Best%20Manager%20Just%20Got%20Promoted%20(2).png --- [![CENTERED LOGO Dark](https://centered.work/hubfs/CENTERED%20LOGO%20Dark.png)](https://centered.work) - Services - [Breakthrough Lab](https://centered.work/breakthrough-lab) - [Design Sprint](https://centered.work/services/design-sprints) - [Innovation Coaching](https://centered.work/innovation-coaching) - Case Study - Books - Workshops - Podcast - Articles - About Us [Get in touch](https://centered.work/contact-us) Coaching # You've Hired Someone Who's Done It Before You hire the VP from the company a hundred times your size, and for a few weeks everyone feels a little safer. There's a grown-up in the room now. [Preston Chandler](https://centered.work/articles/author/preston-chandler) Oct 23, 2026 --- At some point in a company's growth, the same advice starts coming from every direction. The board says it. Your investors say it. You start to believe it yourself: you need to bring in some adults. People who've operated at scale. Someone with the big logo on the résumé who has, blessedly, done this before. So you go find them. You hire the VP from the company a hundred times your size, the one whose LinkedIn reads like a case study, and for a few weeks everyone feels a little safer. You've de-risked. There's a grown-up in the room now. Then, six months in, something's off. The company feels heavier. There are more meetings, more planning cycles, more slides. Decisions that used to happen in a conversation now route through a process. The scrappy people who built the thing are quieter, or updating their résumés. And you can't shake the feeling that you're slowly turning into a smaller, poorer version of the company you hired that person away from. Here's the trap, and it's a subtle one. "Done it before" almost never means what you think it means. It usually means they ran a function inside a large company that was already large. They operated a machine other people built, at steady state, with the budget, brand, staff, and infrastructure a big company takes for granted. That is a real and valuable skill. It is also a completely different skill from building the machine while it's still moving, with none of those things in place. Running a big company and scaling into one are not the same job. And when you hire for the first and quietly ask for the second, you get someone who does the natural thing: they recreate the environment they came from. They add the layer. They install the planning process. They bring in the specialists, the governance, the reviews, the "how real companies do this." Every move is reasonable on its own, and every move is familiar to them. That familiarity is the whole problem, because none of it is being imported for being good. It is being imported for being known. It is what they did at their last job, and doing it again feels like competence. Here is where the premise quietly falls apart. We treat "worked at a big company" as proof that someone knows how to run things well, but the logo only tells you the company got big. It does not tell you the company was run well. Most large organizations are not humming machines of efficiency. They are slow, layered, and full of process that survives out of habit, propped up by brand, distribution, and moats that forgive an enormous amount of internal waste. Plenty of companies operate badly and stay big anyway. So when someone imports "how we did it at the last place," they are often importing that company's accumulated dysfunction, mistaken for wisdom because the place was large. You are not being handed a proven playbook. You are being handed one person's memory of one bloated system, an operating system built for ten times your size that may not have worked especially well even there, and being asked to bolt it on top of yours. The cost shows up in two places at once. The first is speed. The nimbleness that was your actual advantage gets buried under process designed for an organization with a hundred times your surface area, and you start losing to companies your own size for reasons you can't quite name. The second cost is quieter and worse: the people who built the place. Told that their ways are "not scalable," watching their judgment get replaced by procedure, the early team starts to drift out. And they take with them exactly the thing that made the company worth scaling in the first place. None of this means experience is the enemy, or that you should only ever promote from within. But it's worth knowing the real odds on an outside hire, because they aren't what the résumé implies. When Wharton's Matthew Bidwell studied external hires against people promoted from within, he found that the outsiders were paid 18 to 20% more, scored measurably lower on performance for their first two years, and were more likely to leave, whether they were pushed or walked ([Knowledge at Wharton](https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-external-hires-get-paid-more-and-perform-worse-than-internal-staff/)). You pay a premium for the logo and then wait two years to find out whether it travels. Sometimes it does. Often, the thing that made them great somewhere else was the somewhere else. The reason this keeps happening is that the logo is reassuring to exactly the people who feel least sure. A founder who has never scaled a company is understandably nervous about scaling one, and a big name feels like insurance. The board pattern-matches on the résumé. Everyone gets to feel like the adults have arrived. The problem is that "has worked at a big company" and "can help us become one without losing ourselves" are different claims, and only one of them is printed on the résumé. So the fix isn't to stop hiring experienced leaders. It's to hire for the right experience and screen for the right instinct. Look for people who have actually scaled a company through the stage you're about to enter, not just operated above it once it was already there. Ask whether they built the thing they're known for or inherited it, because a caretaker of a great machine and a builder of one look identical on paper and behave nothing alike. Ask them what was broken at their last company and what they would never repeat, because the ones worth hiring are clear-eyed about the system they came from rather than reverent about it. And watch, in the interview, for the tell that matters most: does this person want to understand what makes you unusual before they start changing it, or do they already know what you "should" be doing because it's what they did last time? The ones worth hiring can tell you which few big-company practices are worth importing, and, more importantly, which of yours are worth protecting. Then, when they arrive, make sure they get onboarded to your culture instead of quietly onboarding you to their last one. Be explicit about what's truly broken and needs their experience, and what is load-bearing and not up for redesign. Give them a mandate to adapt what they know to your context, not to install it wholesale. The point of growing up isn't to look like every other grown-up company. The experience you bring in should help you become the strongest version of the bigger company you're becoming, not a discount imitation of one you're not. Hire the people who make you more of what made you worth scaling. Be very careful of the ones who just make you more like everyone else. [Coaching](https://centered.work/articles/tag/coaching) [Built to Break](https://centered.work/articles/tag/built-to-break) ## Similar posts Coaching ### [Everything Still Runs Through the People Who Built It](https://centered.work/articles/everything-still-runs-through-the-people-who-built-it) Then you grow. And the exact instinct that made the company work begins holding it back — quietly, without anyone noticing the moment it flipped. Preston Chandler Oct 2, 2026 Coaching ### [Your Competitor Just Validated Their Idea in 5 Days. How Long Has Yours Been "In Development"?](https://centered.work/articles/your-competitor-just-validated-their-idea-in-5-days.-how-long-has-yours-been-in-development) They just tested their idea in five days. With actual users. Got feedback. Made decisions. And now they’re off to the races while your team is still... JL Heather Feb 4, 2026 Consulting ### [What’s Killing Your Innovation](https://centered.work/articles/whats-killing-your-innovation) What's killing your innovation? If you feel like things are getting bogged down, it’s time to take a hard look at what might be standing in the way. Preston Chandler Oct 22, 2024 ### Get notified of new insights Be the first to know about new insights into the world of innovation.  We send out monthly updates on what it takes to integrate innovation into your organization. ## Accelerate your innovation journey For over a decade, we've partnered with leading businesses to transform and drive growth. 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