Earlier this year, we ran this process on our own Senior Marketing Manager search.

We filtered 40+ qualified applicants down to 12 interviews. Before a single call was scheduled.

We walked out with a hire we’re still confident about. The person is in the seat. The role is working.

And here’s the part that matters: that role no longer routes back through me. It runs. Because every decision was documented, scored, and made with data instead of feeling.

Then we ran the same process when we needed to bring on two Scalable Business Advisors… the people who do the 1:1 installs directly with our clients.

Same funnel. Same pre-application questions. Same scorecard.

The result wasn’t just two good hires. It up-leveled the entire fulfillment side of the business.

Install quality improved. Client outcomes improved. The team got better… and I got pulled out of the part of the business I used to have to babysit.

That’s what a system does that gut feel can’t. It puts the right person in the right seat, so the seat doesn’t need you anymore. It’s repeatable. Across roles. Across functions. Every time.

The cost of not having it is bigger than most founders ever count. A client of ours in the health space added up what one bad marketing hire actually cost them:

Salary paid before the let-go.
Severance.
Six months of missed momentum.
Starting the search over.

$340,000. (That’s one hire.)

But here’s the part that stings more than the cash: a wrong hire doesn’t just cost you money. It keeps the business dependent on you.

The role drifts back onto your plate. You become the backstop again. And the thing that quietly kills your company’s value… you being the person everything runs through… gets worse with every miss.

Right-seat hiring is how you reverse that. It reduces key-person risk. It builds a business that runs without you in every decision, which is exactly what makes it worth more when you’re ready to step back or sell.

Most founders stop counting at salary and severance. The real cost is ALWAYS bigger.

Here’s what I need you to know: we didn’t always do it this way.

My businesses were growing. Revenue was up. The team looked right.

But we were making expensive gut-feel hiring decisions (for longer than I’d like to admit).

We weren’t bad at interviewing. We were bad at deciding. There’s a difference.

We posted jobs, ran interviews, trusted our gut, crossed our fingers.

And the only advice I kept ignoring was the advice I kept giving myself: that experience and instinct are enough.

They’re not. If your hiring process is off, every new role you fill feeds the same problem, and every one of them lands right back on you. I knew that.

I just hadn’t applied it to my own hires.

Look, I’m not an HR consultant. I’m a founder and operator who’s built and scaled multiple companies, helped hundreds of founders build the teams that let them step back, and still had expensive gut-feel hires happening until I built this system.

So in this workshop, I want to give you the same process I built (compressed into 90 minutes, with your actual open role) so you can build your hiring system, starting right now.

The backstory:

I’ve spent years helping founders at $2M-$20M build the teams, systems, and structures that let them step back from the day-to-day… without the business falling apart behind them.

I teach this stuff for a living.

And for years, my answer to “I hired the wrong person again” was the same answer everyone gives: hire slower. Trust your gut more. Look for “culture fit.”

I believed it. I taught it.

I was wrong.

Not because those things are useless. But because I was answering the right question with the wrong tools.

The question most founders are actually asking isn’t “how do I screen better?” It’s “why do my hires keep underperforming despite good interviews… and why does every role keep ending up back on my desk?”

Those are COMPLETELY different problems. And most founders spend years trying to solve the first one when the second is where all the leverage is.

I kept looking at the candidates and ignoring the process.

Every time a hire didn’t work out, I’d assume it was a people problem. Run a harder interview next time. Ask tougher questions. Be more selective. And it would work… for a while. Then the same pattern would emerge. The role would drift. The person would disengage. I’d step back in to cover. Another expensive exit.

The hiring process was a treadmill. We kept running. We kept interviewing. And the percentage of right hires barely moved, which meant the percentage of work that ran through me barely moved either.

I didn’t need better candidates. I needed to look at how I was making the decision.

So last year, I finally did.

We built a complete hiring funnel for the Senior Marketing Manager role. Documented every stage. Created templates for every decision point. Built scoring criteria before we looked at a single resume.

And we found something that changed how I hire forever: most bad hires aren’t failed by the interview. They’re enabled by the lack of a process that comes before it.

That’s why I built this workshop.

Because if I had this problem (with everything I know, everything I teach) you probably do too. 😉

Here’s the real issue:

Most hiring advice is designed for people who don’t know how to run an interview. Screen harder. Look for red flags. Trust your gut.

That’s not your problem. You can run a decent interview. You’re not a bad judge of people.

The problem is structural. The process has no scaffolding. The decision has no data. And nobody… not the founder, not the hiring manager, not even a good recruiter… has ever sat down and asked: what does winning actually look like in this role, and how do we measure it before we make the offer?

Your interviewer knows how a candidate performed in the room.

That’s not the same as knowing how they’ll perform in the role.

95% of hiring advice is designed to help you pick between candidates. Not to build the system that puts the right candidates in front of you in the first place.

It’s a completely different game.

So I stopped running interviews the way most founders run them (reactive, feeling-based, comparison-shopping) and started building hiring funnels the way operators do: what should this person produce, what does the profile look like, and how do we filter before we ever get on a call?

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. 😮

I’ve now run this process with hundreds of founders.

A services business at $5M had hired the same marketing role three times in two years… same job posting, same interview questions, same result. We rebuilt the funnel from scratch. The next hire is still in the seat 18 months later, and the founder hasn’t touched that function since.

A CEO at $10M who’d never used pre-application questions. His first hire using them? The candidate who became his VP. Screened in from written questions before a single call.

And it isn’t just office roles. A home-services company with field crews had hired the same operations lead twice in two years… twice it landed back on the owner. We built the profile, the scorecard, and a simple walkthrough task. The owner handed the scorecard to his foreman and let him run the final call. The hire they made is still running the crews today, without the owner standing over it.

The pattern is always the same. The right person is out there. The system just isn’t built to find them, or to let go of them once they’re in.

And once you have the process in front of you, the decisions become obvious.

I figured out exactly how to build this system. And we’ll do it live with your actual open role in this workshop.

In the final 45 minutes, you’ll apply these templates to your own open role, with me in the room answering questions as you go.

You won’t just understand how the process works. You’ll have started building it for your next hire before you leave.

Logistics

This is a LIVE, hands-on working session. Not a masterclass. Not a presentation. Not a “hiring tips” webinar.

Bring your open role (or your next expected hire) and you’ll start building the funnel in real time during the working session at the end.