When a company is growing fast, speed becomes the edge.
Customers expect more.
Teams stretch further.
Investors want tighter updates.
And leaders are asked to do more, with less certainty and less time.
In that environment, momentum matters.
But momentum breaks down quietly
and often, it starts with one missing leader.
I’ve seen it happen too often.
A Head of Product leaves.
A CRO search stretches from weeks to quarters.
A VP of Engineering role sits open while the roadmap expands.
At first, things feel manageable.
You ask a few people to “step up.”
You create an interim decision group.
You promise the board the hire will be “closed this quarter.”
But then:
– Product slows down.
– Sales forecasts become less reliable.
– The leadership team stops pushing decisions forward.
And the real cost shows up in months, not in days.
In revenue.
In coordination,
Inconfidence.
In speed.
Because every month without the right leader means:
- Teams spend more time aligning than executing.
- Decisions that used to take hours now take weeks.
- High-performers start looking around.
This is the hidden tax of slow hiring.
And it’s especially painful at the executive level, where the cost of delay compounds quickly.
Think about it:
A late finance leader → missed budgets, unclear burn visibility
A vacant sales leader → pipeline goes stale, deals stall
A missing product leader → roadmap gets fuzzy, teams drift
But here’s the part most companies underestimate:
By the time you feel the pain, the damage is already done.
So how do you fix it?
You plan ahead: early, clearly, and often.
The strongest companies I’ve worked with not only react to leadership gaps but They also anticipate them.
They ask:
- “If we double next year, what roles will break first?”
- “Which decisions are already being delayed by bandwidth?”
- “Who on our team is a flight risk we haven’t admitted yet?”
And then they act:
- They build succession plans before they’re needed.
- They pre-align on comp bands and hiring timelines.
- They develop shortlists of future candidates early.
Because hiring a great exec doesn’t happen in a week.
It often takes months.
And the best ones?
They are already in conversations long before a job opens.
So if you wait until the pain is obvious, you’ve waited too long.
Every week without the right leader is a silent cost.
The numbers don’t always show it.
But the team feels it.
The market feels it.
And eventually, the board feels it.
In fast-growing companies, every leadership hire helps shape what comes next.
The sooner the right person is in place, the faster teams move and make progress.
When hiring takes too long, momentum slows.
Decisions get delayed.
Goals stretch out.
Morale dips.
Each week without the right leader makes the path forward harder.
And early progress is tough to rebuild once it’s lost.